


Something Called Honor

by LadySilver



Series: Something Called Forever [5]
Category: Forever (TV), Highlander: The Raven, Highlander: The Series
Genre: Accidental Child Acquisition (Subverted), Canon Temporary Character Death, Case Fic, Clan Denial, Community: hc_bingo, Crossover, Crossovers by LS, Denial AU, F/M, Knocking Them Down Like Bowling Pins, Original Characters - Freeform, Other Canon Highlander Characters, WIP Big Bang 2016, canon character death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 20:34:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 64,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7589131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySilver/pseuds/LadySilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between her immortal boyfriend and her Immortal friends, Jo's world view is expanding in new - and sometimes painful - ways. But when a young child is the only witness to a brutal beheading of a known Immortal, Jo has to learn how the Game really works in order to find out the truth, before it gets her killed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Saturday - Ensemble

**Author's Note:**

  * For [idelthoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/idelthoughts/gifts).



> This story would not exist if not for idelthoughts. She is responsible for everything from drawing out the original concept, to encouraging the first tentative words, to cheerleading every step, to beta-reading the final--and this doesn't begin to accurately reflect the sheer number of hours and conversations she dedicated to it since wipbigbang started. THANK YOU!
> 
> All remaining mistakes are entirely my own and were probably added after she signed off on the chapters.
> 
> "Something Called Honor" is part of the "Something Called Forever" crossover series. While I don't _think_ it's necessary to read the other stories first to understand this one, the characters and their relationships are evolving far enough from canon at this point that seeing their journey wouldn't hurt.
> 
> As always on my stories, questions, comments, squee, speculation, and concrit are all welcome and appreciated.
> 
>  
> 
> [ ](http://s1252.photobucket.com/user/wlkperkins/media/SCH%20cover%202.jpg.html)  
> 
> 
> Thanks also to idelthoughts and birdthatlookslikeastick for the cover art. There's more art to come when the story is over, too. 

The hardest lesson to learn was not how to keep one's word, but when it was permissible not to.

Twenty-seven minutes late, Richie and Liam finally burst through the diner doors into the crowd that packed the lobby. Clusters of people who were all doing their best to all occupy the small space without acknowledging each other all stopped their conversations long enough to check out the two arriving men, then promptly turned back to their private conversations. Jo raised her hand to acknowledge them. The buzzer for alerting her to her seat being ready blinked in her hand. She'd found a place to stand on the edge of the seating area, back pressed to the corner of the wall. In jeans and a button-down blue shirt, she was dressed on her off-day much like she'd dress for work, except she'd left her weapon at home. Richie almost felt guilty for not having made a similar concession.

"Sorry, god I'm sorry. I know I promised to be here at 10," Richie huffed, out of breath and flushed from the race from the alley he'd left his bike in, as he pushed close enough for his voice to carry over the hubbub. "I hope we didn't keep you waiting."

Beside him, Liam finger-combed his helmet-flattened hair out of his eyes and offered a wan smile of apology that quickly faded to one of concern. "Where's Henry? He didn't stand you up too, did he?"

"It's no problem," Jo answered, a wave of her fingers dismissing the need for apology. "And, no. He's over there." She pointed toward the register and the spinning glass dessert display that stood next to it. Henry was bent in half, examining the pies on offer as if trying to solve the mystery of how they'd ended up there. He glanced up just then and, on spotting them, began to make his way over. "Seems like everyone in the City wants to eat here this morning. The place was swamped when we got here and hasn't let up since. They said forty minutes…" She glanced at her watch and frowned. "…about an hour ago. So, you haven't missed anything except a lot of standing around." Her eyes narrowed as she got a good look at Richie for the first time and saw the beige hip-length coat he concealed his sword in; knowing it was there made her uncomfortable. She'd never said as much, but Richie hadn't missed how she always looked right at his left side when they met, and then tried very hard not to look at it again.

"Yeah, well I'd rather've been in here than out there," Richie responded. He shifted closer to Jo as a large group near them quit waiting and began to file out. He felt her tense up and was searching for something to say to mollify her when Henry arrived.

"Richie, Liam!" he greeted. He was also dressed like he was going to work, his tailored trousers and a fitted waistcoat appearing especially out of place among the jeans and t-shirts of most of the other customers. Tugging out his pocket watch, he also checked the time and frowned. "I was beginning to think you wouldn't make it. Traffic?"

In this city, that one word served as everything from a general topic of discussion to an excuse for all manner of ills to a commentary on the state of humanity. In this case, it also happened to be legitimate.

"Power outage," Liam answered. "The traffic lights are out all along the street. Be grateful you arrived before they went down."

Richie shook his head in remembered exasperation. "You'd think no one had ever heard of right of way. The number of times we almost got hit, well it's a good thing we're…" He stopped, raising his eyebrows in invitation for those in the know to fill in the word. Jo pressed her lips together, but gave a short nod to show she understood. They'd get her used to the idea eventually, help her see that she and they weren't so different in the ways that mattered.

"The challenges of safely navigating this perpetual morass is the primary reason I gave up driving," Henry supplied. "All the exhaust and smog, the constant blaring of horns, the road rage. Sometimes it makes me long for the days of horse and carriage. Drivers were so much more attentive and generous toward their fellows on the road."

Jo started to nod in acceptance of Henry's declaration. A snort interrupted her.

"Oh ho," Liam chuckled in disagreement. "You've forgotten how it was. The horse manure everywhere, the clomping of hooves and the rattle of wooden or metal wheels on cobblestones—and then there were the horses that keeled over on the job. I'll take a stalled car over a dead horse any day, especially on any _hot_ day."

For a long moment, Henry looked shocked that someone had dared contradict his recollection. As often as he and Liam had traded stories about their pasts, they'd never done so in front of Jo.

"This oughta be good," Richie whispered to her, shifting to stand as much next to her as the shape of the wall allowed. For once, she didn't even try to get out of the way.

"I assure you, I remember it quite clearly." Tugging at the lapels of his coat, Henry threw his shoulders back like he was getting ready to give a stump speech. "The moderate improvement in sanitation that a switch to the internal combustion engine provided does not offset the greater danger in which cars put both motorists and pedestrians. I would remind you that the traffic signal was invented in recognition of that danger; prior to the prevalence of cars, we had no need for such guides."

Liam was not so easily backed down. Hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket, he settled in to defend his position. "I'll grant you that cars require an external layer of regulation—it's not like a drunk driver can trust his car to get him home the way his horse could have—but I won't concede that they're significantly more dangerous." Liam stopped, his gaze falling to the floor. The wooden floor showed the traces of scuff marks from thousands of shoes, none of which Liam was seeing right now.

The buzzer lit up, making Jo jump. For a few minutes, the conversation was shelved while they traded the disk in for menus and were lead to their seats.

"Not more dangerous?" Henry prompted, after the waitress swung by and took their drink order. "I have performed more autopsies on victims of car accidents in the past two years than I ever did on the victims of carriage accidents."

"How much of that is because there are more people in general?" Liam countered. "Seems to me that the number of people I've buried from each is comparable." With his thumbnail, he scraped at a crusted spot of food that the hasty wipe-down had missed. "I've never been killed in a car accident."

"Okaaaay," Jo responded, "That's a sentence I didn't expect."

Liam gave her a conciliatory smile. "I'm sure you could assemble quite a list, if you wanted to. That's a consequence everyone skips over when they warn you about consorting with immortals."

The topic was on the verge of changing, but Richie wasn't ready for it to. What Liam had already volunteered suggested that he had more he wanted to say. And there was more Richie wanted to hear; he knew so little the early years of his friend, aside from what Joe had told him back on the fateful day when Richie had revived from the dead in Henry's morgue. The opportunity to fill in the blanks was too good to pass up. "Hey, man, I don't mean to pry." The corner of his mouth curled up in acknowledgment of his own disingenuity, and then he had to stop and consider his wording; this was a topic that Immortals considered somewhat taboo. Only, Liam was a friend. Henry was a friend. Jo was…hopefully on her way to becoming a friend. Taboos didn't hold as much power in the company of friends, so Richie decided to go for it. "You're saying you _have_ been killed in a carriage accident. It was your first death, wasn't it?"

Liam cut Richie a sideways look that might have made a more casual conversationalist back off. Richie didn't; pulling his curiosity back in once he'd let it out had always been beyond his ability. With a nod, Liam accepted what this question and its answer would mean for their friendship. He already trusted Richie not to turn on him once off Holy Ground. Now he was going to trust him with details of his mortal life. "It was." He licked his lips, his blue eyes flattening as he remembered. "I was on my way to the pub—nothing consequential—and a storm rolled in. Lightning, thunder, rain pounding so hard it could leave bruises. The horses spooked, the cab tipped, and I was thrown out and trampled. I died face down in the muck." Liam rubbed the scar over his right eyebrow, which wouldn't have been from that accident, but had probably become a stand-in for the fatal wound. "There's another sentence for you, lassy," he said, with a nod to Jo that broke the somber mood of the revelation. Back to Henry, he added, "No, I can safely say that I don't miss horse-based transportation at all."

Ignoring the last part, Henry leaned forward excitedly. "How would you rank trampling as a method of death? If you could compare it against, say—"

"Oh no," Jo interrupted. "We're here to eat. You guys wanna talk about how un-romantic carriage rides were when they were the only way to travel, that's great. That's fine. But I'm putting the kibosh on disease and death as topics. If I want to know about the 1850s cholera epidemic, I'll read a book. When I'm not eating."

"A wise decision," Liam agreed. He'd pressed up against the wall while he was talking. Freed of the need to share any more about his past, he squared his body with the table and drew a long drink of his coffee.

"How did—?" Henry started, a raised eyebrow punctuating his surprise at Jo's knowledge.

"I'm not completely ignorant about history," she responded. As if realizing that she'd spoken too harshly, she gave Henry's shoulder a small bump with hers, then twined his arm and pulled him just enough closer that no one could question that they were sitting _together_. "Oh, look. The waitress is here."

Realizing that none of them had so much as cracked the menu, the waitress politely tapped her pen on her order book and offered to come back. The restaurant was still thrumming with busy-ness, every table packed, and the waitress had a harried look behind her practiced smile. They quickly decided on their orders, and only after the waitress had left did the awkward silence of a topic that had been stretched too far to hold its shape descend on them.

A long minute passed with each of them looking from one to the other for possible topics.

"So," Richie ventured, clearing his throat. He wrapped his hands around the small glass of water that was sitting in front of him; the wet chill of its condensation mimicked a nervous sweat. What did people usually talk about when they were trying to get to know each other? Richie mentally kicked himself; he used to be good at this. Well, he used to be good at flirting and running his mouth off, neither of which seemed fitting now. Previous meetings had always come with a built in topic, all of which now felt as exhausted as further discussion of old time traffic problems.

"You know, there are a lot of things I don't miss either," Jo stated, saving the day. "When I think about how much things have changed in just my lifetime, the list is mostly additions: iPhones, wi-fi, electric cars—"

Henry made a choked noise and held up a finger like he was going to interrupt her, but Jo rolled her eyes and kept going.

"—DVDs, drones. It's harder to think about the things we don't have anymore, probably because whatever replaced it is better. There's one thing, though: Puddin' Pops. Nasty, messy things that tasted like chalk. Sacrificing the space they took up in the freezer section was worth it for all the Cherry Garcia we got instead."

"Hey, I loved Puddin' Pops," Richie protested. His mouth watered at the memory of the flavored milk, which was a special and rare treat compared to the overpowering fake-fruit of Popsicles, his summer time staple otherwise. Puddin' Pops had been too expensive for most of the families he lived with to keep in stock, which only made him appreciate them more. "A couple of seconds under running water to melt that crust of ice off, and you were set. Are you sure they're not still around?" How had he not noticed that?

"Yeah, they've been gone for…come to think of it, I don't know how long. Shows you how much I _don't_ miss them." Her face scrunched in thought, and Richie noticed Henry's expression soften in happiness at the sight. They were not a couple Richie would have imagined would work together, but what he'd seen seemed to be a good fit. Jo gave Henry a connection to the 21st century that he desperately needed, and Henry kept her from drawing indelible lines between right and wrong. What was more, Henry showed no difficulty with forming a romantic relationship with someone so much younger. Centuries younger. It gave Richie hope for his own new relationship.

And Jo'd asked him a question. Shelving his musings on immortal-mortal relationships, he made himself deal with the current topic—again.

"How do you know about them?" she'd asked. "They were definitely gone before you were old enough to—" Jo cut herself off, bringing a sudden end to the lighter mood she'd handed them. "I keep forgetting."

Richie shrugged a helpless "what can we do?" at her. Some things really were out of his power, such as the ability to look his age. She'd either get used to that too—or she wouldn't. "You and me both," he said.

Jo gave him a steady once-over, as if trying to see past his surface youth to the man inside. "OK," she said at last, her eyes hardening. "But how did you feel about New Coke?"

That was one easy. Richie stuck his finger in his mouth and mock-gagged.

Satisfied, Jo winked. "That was a gimme. Let's see what you've got. Name something you don't miss."

Put on the spot, he couldn't think of anything she hadn't already named. And he really wanted a Puddin' Pop. Were they really not made anymore? Or was it just a regional thing? In his travels, he'd encountered so many foods that he'd've sworn weren't available anymore happily being sold in out-of-the-way markets. Thinking about his travels gave him an idea. "Toll baskets," he said. When everyone looked a question at him, he clarified, "Ya know, those baskets on toll roads where you had to throw your change. I swear those things were designed to spit the coins out. Never mind trying to find the _right_ change." He braced himself for Jo to question how he'd know about those since he'd obviously only had his license for a couple years.

Instead, her lip curled and she gave a small shudder. "That couldn't've been easy on a bike," she said, "especially with as much as you travel." No doubt she was thinking of Richie's sudden disappearance from the city when he ran away from the headhunter.

"Mostly I try to stick to roads that don't make me pay for their use," he said. "The best ones are the long, flat stretches where no one cares how fast you go."

Jo sighed the conflicted sigh of wanting to share in that experience and wanting to warn him that speed limits were laws too. At last she settled on: "Just be careful." Whether for his safety or to not get caught, she didn't elaborate.

Since his safety wasn't really a concern, Richie took her to mean the latter. "Always am," he promised.

The food arrived then. With the smell of maple syrup and fried pork wafting around them, they listened to Henry go on a tirade about the difficulties of candlelight, especially in regards to reading. Getting enough light not to strain the eyes was one problem. But his real issue, apparently, was with the dangers of open flame around paper, especially in confined places where the need for secrecy outweighed the need to have an accessible egress. Richie got the impression that Henry really wanted to tell them about a time when he'd burned to death, but he managed—with obvious effort—to switch to talking about what a wonder gas lighting had been when it was first introduced.

Liam nodded along, his eyes shining in reminiscence, though his mouth stayed too full for any but the most mumbled interjection of agreement. After hearing him get into it with Henry over transport, his easy agreement on the topic of lighting came as a surprise. Over the next few minutes, they learned about Liam's loathing of powdered wigs—which Henry both agreed with and had no deaths to associate with—and Jo's chagrin at the taste of her youthful self who thought that the plastic charm bracelets with the two-inch long charms that snagged on _everything_ were worth collecting bottles from around the neighborhood to recycle for spending money.

And then it was Richie's turn again.

“Let's see,” he said. He dragged a strip of bacon through the syrup on his plate while he racked his mind for something else to contribute. With the recent popular surge of interest in vintage items, a lot of what had fallen out of use was being dragged back in. Record players, for instance. He'd seen them for sale at Target, of all places, being packaged and marketed for people who'd never heard of spinning as a music term. And he'd seen _records_ on sale at Barnes  & Noble this last holiday season. But, that gave him an idea. “Boom boxes! We had Walkmans, so instead of sticking with portable music, someone got the bright idea to cart the whole stereo around.” He mimed holding one of the huge devices on his shoulder, his head bobbing along to the beat of some eardrum destroying song that only he could hear.

He froze as the Presence of another Immortal swept over him.


	2. Saturday - Richie & Liam

Across the restaurant the bell over the door dinged and a well-dressed man stepped inside, his eyes already scanning the patrons.

Richie dropped his arms and hunkered down, sending out the silent prayer of every school child who doesn't want the teacher to call on him: don't notice me, please don't notice me. The new Immortal would know he wasn't the only one in the building, but maybe if he didn't get a response, he'd take the hint and go away. There were plenty of places to eat. And Richie could avoid Henry and Jo seeing this part of his life up close.

God, the urge to make eye-contact was so strong. No biological imperative demanded that two Immortals acknowledge each other on coming into range, yet the habits formed in the service of trying to stay alive achieved the same end. Avoiding confrontation had never been Richie's strong suit, especially when he'd been told to, and the Presence of the other Immortal was practically a siren song. Only with effort could he keep his eyes glued to the table. He felt Liam's hand clasp over his, and focused on the new warmth.

“It gets easier with practice,” Liam whispered. “Relax your shoulders. If you look too tense, he'll know you're trying to hide.”

It was surprisingly difficult to obey, and Richie managed only by pressing his feet hard against the base of the bench Henry sat on. He thought he felt the wood giving under the force.

“That would make it my turn...Richie, are you feeling well? You've gone frighteningly pale. Liam?”

Henry and Jo were both looking at them in concern. They had to have heard what Liam said, though neither acknowledged it.

Wrapping his free hand around his coffee cup, Liam started to raise it as if to drink. Since it was empty, Richie guessed that the real reason for the charade was so no one could lipread Liam's answer. “Another Immortal just walked in.” He offered an empty smile, then continued as if his next statement followed naturally on his first. “Can you think of anything better than boomboxes? They were weren't one of our wiser cultural moments.”

“Another Immortal?” Jo said, slightly louder than necessary. “Where?”

Richie hissed out a breath between his teeth that came too late to stop her. She was already twisting around in her seat. Though she'd been told that the Immortals could sense each other, she had no reason for understanding what that meant. Nor would she know the role that making eye contact played in how the Immortals approached each other.

She spotted the man right away, and he caught her looking at him, just as Richie had feared.

The man made his way over to the table and stopped, his eyes locked on Jo's. The black long coat he wore flared open, revealing the expensive suit he wore underneath. His dark blue tie provided the only color in his clothes. “I'm Franklin Drake,” he said, in the tone of someone who expected the listener to be impressed. Richie's hand clenched around Liam's at the flare of panic that ran through him; Drake thought Jo was the Immortal he'd sensed. Jo blinked at him, then swept her gaze down toward the black leather briefcase he carried as if she expected to find a bomb. She clearly wasn't used to strangers introducing themselves when she didn't have to prompt for their names first. One of Drake's eyebrows started to twitch at Jo's apparent refusal to follow protocol.

There was only one way out of this. Richie sighed and stuck out his hand. “Richie Ryan,” he responded. The tight fit of the booth made it difficult to clamber out without drawing the kind of attention that Richie really didn't want to draw, so he didn't stand up. The fewer restaurant patrons who saw the two men interacting, the better it was for both of them. “I'm the one you're looking for.”

Drake's attention swept over to Richie. His eyes were a dark brown that swallowed the pupil, creased at the corners with fine lines. His face fell when he saw who had spoken, as if he couldn't believe his ill-fortune at being denied conversation with a beautiful woman for _this_. “I should have guessed. One of these things is not like the other." He swept his gaze disapprovingly around the table, acknowledging the three people who appeared to be middle-aged against the one person who was not. Liam managed to stay relaxed throughout. "I'm not looking for anyone,” Drake added, as his attention once again landed on Richie, “Two days in town on business, and then I fly back out. I'm only here for lunch.”

“Good,” Richie responded, trying to keep his relief from showing too strongly. “That's all I want, too.” He indicated the table that was spread with half-consumed plates of waffles and omelets. “Well, breakfast. Brunch.” He took a breath and stopped himself before his explanation went any further into irrelevancy. “I don't want any trouble.”

Drake gave a nod. “Then we're agreed.” The buzzer in his hand lit up then. Over the hum of the restaurant, they could all hear the sound. “It seems my table is ready.” Still, he didn't move. His eyes had narrowed and his attention was focused on Richie like he thought he recognized whom he was speaking to, and wasn't sure. “Ryan,” he repeated, the light of recognition coming on. His grip tightened on the disk and his Adam's apple bobbed in his throat as he swallowed, the only signs of his composure breaking. “Yes,” he said, “I'll be leaving town as soon as I'm able.” This time it was a promise, almost a plea, and Richie found that he was hard-pressed not to acknowledge it like he was granting permission from on high. With that, Drake swung around and strode back to the hostess stand.

The rush of adrenaline that came with meeting another Immortal and viscerally preparing for a Challenge had Richie's awareness broadened. Most of his attention was on Drake's progress as he turned in the disk to the hostess and was lead to a booth-meant-for-two on the far side of the restaurant, yet Richie still noted Jo pushing her plate out of the way and leaning her arms on the table.

“What just happened here?” she asked.

He heard Liam shift next to him—a thin creak of denim against vinyl—and felt the slight eddy of air as Liam's body moved fractionally away. “I'd call that the best case scenario,” the priest answered. “Bit of a surprise, too. That's not the way these meetings typically go.”

Jo's mouth opened, then closed again. Her fists curled against the scratched wood. “OK, so I did read that part right. Putting aside for the moment how close I just came to becoming a conspirator in a murder—” She paused, obviously uneasy with her own willingness to put that topic aside— “Can someone tell me why that conversation felt suspiciously like something out of _The Godfather_?”

Not once did Drake glance back, yet Richie couldn't shake the impression that he was still being assessed. On reaching the booth, Drake slipped out of his coat, folding it carefully around his sword, then stood for a long moment with his head tilted, as if listening. The drone of voices in the restaurant would block any conversations but those closest to him. The hostess said something that she then had to repeat, and Drake finally slid into the booth, the sword-and-coat combo hidden in the darkness under the table, yet easily accessible. Not listening, then. Thinking. Debating with himself.

Richie pulled his focus back to the people at his table—to Jo, who was looking at him with narrowed eyes, though her question had been laid out for anyone to pick up. He didn't know how to answer.

Liam got to it first. “Our Richie has a bit of a reputation to live up to,” he said. If he dared pinch Richie's cheek, he probably would have.

“A reputation...” Jo started, then cut herself off. “Never mind. I have a feeling this is one of those things I shouldn't know too much about.”

“It's not me, exactly,” Richie said anyway. Her reticence aside, there were certain things she had to understand. “It's my...I guess 'pedigree' is the word. My first teacher is one of the favorites to win the Game. _His_ first teacher is the other. Me? I just happened to break into the wrong store one night, and the next thing you know I'm getting trained by the guys everyone wants to beat. Now the others look at me and see an easy path to them.” He grimaced, then shrugged. He'd had a lot of rough lots in life, and being the guy to defeat before the MacLeod Boss Level hardly seemed to be the worst. At least this was one area where he could fight back.

“I suspect that he may be interested in testing the validity of your reputation,” Henry supplied, with a nod toward where Drake was studying the menu. It looked like what a person sitting in a restaurant should be doing, until Henry pointed out that “the angle he's sitting in suggests that he's getting ready to stand up, and he has now reached down to touch his sword twice. Unless he's concerned about someone stealing it—which is unlikely given where and how it's concealed—I'd say he's giving some thought to putting it to use.”

Richie hadn't caught any of that consciously, yet it explained the warning jangling through his instincts. “Yeah, I think we'd better finish up and get out of here.” He twisted in his seat until he spotted their waitress and signaled for her to bring the check. To Liam he said, “Let's get you back to Holy Ground. I don't think he knows you're one of us, but just in case...”

With a nod, Liam snagged the last piece of bacon on his plate and stuck it in his mouth. “That would be for the best. I'd prefer to not have to give up my sojourns out of the church.” He slipped out of the booth after Richie and reached for the short jacket he'd worn in. It was currently hanging over Richie's on the hooks on the side of the booth, the better to help conceal the outline of Richie's sword. A careful, wordless choreography of where they stood allowed for both men to slip their coats on without anyone in the restaurant catching glimpse of a weapon that the sign on the front door expressly forbid its patrons from bringing inside.

“You two get going,” Jo suggested. “We can cover the bill for now and we can figure out the split later.”

The silent communication continued with Richie and Liam sharing a look of unease. “We should all leave together,” Richie stated. It took all his willpower not to check on Drake.

“It's really no difficulty,” Henry replied. “Jo and I are quite happy to continue our brunch.” He gestured at his plate, and the waffle that was barely half-eaten because he'd been too intent on their discussion, then at Jo's, which held only smears of syrup and a few crumbs. “Well, perhaps she'd enjoy a refill on her coffee while I continue my brunch.” With a smile at Jo, he managed to both apologize for detaining her and promise that she wouldn't regret the extra time spent in his company.

The waitress swung by the table then, and Liam intercepted the check before she could set it down. “Richie's right,” Liam said, as soon as the waitress left again. He flapped the check in the air. “We should all leave together. It's...well, let's just say that there's a certain element of risk in being a known associate of an Immortal.” To Richie, he asked, “You ready?” and, on getting a confirming nod, started toward the register.

Richie followed, sticking close so that his Presence and Liam's would stay merged. Behind him, he heard the susurration of a whispered debate, then creak of vinyl as Henry slid out of the booth.

“When you say 'a certain element of risk,'” Jo started when she caught up to him, “do you mean...” She trailed off, mostly because they'd reached the counter and she didn't want to ask the rest of her question in front of the cashier. At least, that's what Richie hoped. It was entirely possible that she'd changed her mind about whether she wanted to know this, too.

Since Richie didn't dare step out of the way while Liam started the transaction, he could only give her a shrug. A few minutes followed of each of them taking their turn getting rung up, paying, and assuring the cashier that everything had been to their satisfaction.

Finally, they made it outside, blinking in the bright late-morning sunlight. The dull roar of traffic swelled up around them, along with the stench of exhaust and rotting garbage that pervaded the city. Richie slung an arm around Jo's shoulders in what he hoped she'd see as a show of camaraderie—her continued discomfort around him only made him work harder to be affable—and gave her arm a little squeeze. “It's just a precaution,” he said. “Better safe than sorry, and all that. You know?” Regardless of her reason for not asking, she really didn't need to know the reality: how many spouses and lovers of Immortals ended up dead well before their times, or how many friends got cut down by a hunter looking to demoralize his target before Challenging him. There wasn't much about his life that he could ease her reservations about, so he was going to take this one.

Slipping out from under his arm, Jo turned to regard Richie levelly. “If you're going to fight this guy, do me a favor and keep it out of my jurisdiction.”

“And I'll be sure to never mention it,” Richie agreed. If she wanted, Jo could arrest him, could force him to have to abandon this life before he was ready to. He couldn't take back what she already knew, but he could try respect her tolerance for learning more. Call it a truce.

“Dueling,” Henry interjected. As everyone's eyes settled on him, he tugged at his scarf to settle it more comfortably under his collar. “It was outlawed in England in 1840, yet didn't start to fall out of favor in America until later in the century. Of course, by then the accepted practice was to use pistols, and the purpose of the duel was to gain honor, not to try to kill one's opponent.”

“What are you talking about?” Jo asked.

Henry stopped in the act of straightening his cuffs to respond. “I believe it was my turn to provide a response. Something I don't miss: dueling. As a young boy, I was privy to—”

“We're gonna get going before Drake finishes changing his mind," Richie interjected. The faster he could get Liam away from Drake, the better. Out of range, out of mind. As soon as they were gone, Jo and Henry should be safer since Drake would have no way of knowing they were there unless he came outside to check. "Gimme a raincheck on the rest of that story.” He nodded at Henry—who nodded back—,saluted Jo—who didn't—, then turned and started toward his bike.

The walkway was littered with cracks and jutting corners from where the winter cold had stressed the cement, and Richie's steps hit the cracks harder than necessary. Henry's blithe denunciation of dueling had felt personal, though it probably wasn't. If Richie had learned anything about the man during their association, it was that Henry's eagerness to share his observations often overrode any tact about whether he should. Not that Richie disagreed with the sentiment.

“In a time when young men were raised with the expectation of becoming soldiers, dueling as an accepted and legal part of society had its merits,” Liam commented. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket, then cast a wry grin over his shoulder at Jo and Henry's retreating forms. “There's a lot to be said for having a defined way to settle a grievance, to stop it from escalating into rebellion. Or worse.” He stepped smoothly over a hole in the sidewalk that glistened with rainbow-sheened water. Quieter, he added, “Sometimes I do miss it.”

Richie cast him a surprised look. He didn't think they were talking about pistols anymore. “You ever think about rejoining the Game?”

Liam's answer was quick. Rote. “I made a vow to God.” He skirted a pigeon that was pecking at a discarded hot dog bun, oblivious to the tramping feet on all sides that could injure it, then doubled back to nudge both the bun and the pigeon out of the main traffic of the sidewalk. “If something's easy to give up, then doing so isn't a sacrifice.” That also sounded rote, and Liam must have heard the platitude it had become, because he hunched deeper into his jacket and walked for most of the next block with his head down, concentrating on not tripping on the broken sidewalk. Finally, he answered, “Yes.” He drew a deep breath, as if expecting to get struck by lightning right then, and let it out when nothing happened.

“I get it, man,” Richie answered. His own departure from the Game had lasted days, not centuries, yet he'd still had time to miss the feel of the sword in his hand and the thrill of the fight itself. Unbidden, his hand drifted inside his jacket. The metal of the sword's hilt, warm from being next to his body, reassured him that there was a reason for the life he'd been given.

“It's not going to happen,” Liam continued. “I'm a man of my word, and I can do more good in this world by keeping my word than not. Losing that wouldn't be worth whatever temporary pleasure I might gain from playing.” Temporary, they both knew, because after this long out of the Game, Liam wasn't likely to survive past his first fight if he rejoined it.

Richie pulled his hand out of coat before Liam could get the wrong idea, and rubbed up the back of his head instead. “Yeah, well, if you ever want to spar, you know, for exercise, it could be a good change from basketball.”

For a moment, Richie thought Liam was going to reject the offer out-of-hand, and he mentally kicked himself for how much it sounded like he was trying to pressure Liam into breaking his vow to never raise a sword against anyone again. He wasn't, and he never would. Liam gave him a thoughtful look, searching for the intention behind the offer, and must have found what Richie meant. His brows drew together. “Rich, do you need someone to practice against?” With the threat of a Challenge so close, that was a question Richie couldn't afford to dismiss. As valuable as the solitary repetition of forms were for mastering the technique of sword fighting, nothing rivaled sparring with an opponent for having to learn to adapt to the unpredictability of a real combat. “What happened to your friend Matt? I thought he was teaching you now?”

Ah, Methos. Liam didn't know him by that name, of course, and he probably never would, which only made it harder to fully explain the situation. “He is. And it's good. I'm learning a lot.” He brushed up over his head again. “It's just...I wouldn't mind going up against someone I can beat.” That was another problem: an Immortal who had forgotten that he could win a fight was an Immortal who wasn't going to.

What his physical presence hadn't done, his laugh did; Liam let out a guffaw that sent the pigeons lumbering into the sky. “So that's how it is, is it?” He chuckled again, a hand over his stomach. “Well, if my inexperience can be of use, then I am at your service. There's nothing in my vow to prevent me from aiding a friend, where I can.” They'd reached the motorcycle, and without needing to be asked, Liam positioned himself to block the alley's security camera from seeing Richie remove his sword from his jacket and slipping it into the sheath affixed to the bike. "I'm on for the eleven o'clock Mass tomorrow, then I have the afternoon free. Why don't you come on by?"

To church? Richie hadn't been to church in five…four…years. There'd been a Christmas service he'd attended with his last girlfriend, shortly before she included breaking up with him in her New Year's resolutions for a better life. The breakup had no bearing on his church attendance except that he'd hit the road after that, had spent a few months living itinerantly, and had fallen out of the routine. "Uh, I'm not exactly in good standing," Richie hedged. He straddled the bike, suddenly, acutely aware that he was admitting this to a priest.

"Now that is a problem I really am qualified to help with, laddie," Liam answered, his brogue deepening. Here, the omnipresent rumble of the city was muted, held back by the walls of brick and concrete that lined the way. Tilting his face upward, Liam considered what little he could see of the sky, one finger pressed against his lip, for a long moment before adding, "You'll need to take Confession. I can arrange for a private session, unless you'd prefer to go to someone else."

Richie winced. As much as he'd always viewed himself as a Catholic, he also hadn't put any effort into regular practice. Forging a Baptismal certificate hadn't even crossed his mind—any of the times he'd crafted a new identity. "You know, how about I meet you after lunch?" He grinned to take the sting out of his rejection. "I'm gonna need a little more time to pull together a complete list of my sins."

Again Liam laughed. "Let me save us both some effort. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, I absolve you of any sins necessary to live as an Immortal in this world." He signed a cross in the air, then picked up the passenger helmet.

Richie was a little taken aback at how abbreviated that was; every other time he'd taken confession, there'd been a lot more steps. He'd expected to at least have to admit to what he'd done. "Is that it? No penance?"

With a slight shake of his head, Liam gave another answer he'd obviously been thinking about for a long time: "The Game is penance enough." He twisted the helmet around in his hands, letting the light play off its shiny black surface, then put it on with a note of a topic ended before its time. "If you ever stop feeling remorse for it, we'll talk. Until then, do your best to choose wisely and to limit your transgressions as much as possible—and know that the confessional is as open to you as it is to any mortal."

"Amen," Richie answered. Not that what 'choose wisely' meant was so clear, as Richie knew full well how an offender could rationalize any crime.

Settling on the bike behind him, Liam gave Richie's shoulder a reassuring pat. "I know."

As they were driving toward the exit, it occurred to Richie that, while Liam stayed out of the Game, he still had to engage in the rest of the shadowy decisions that immortality conferred, starting with the constant lying to everyone about who he was. How did he do that with a clear conscience? He asked.

If Liam answered, the words were drowned in the roar of the bike as it sped down the street.


	3. Saturday - Jo & Henry

Jo recognized right away the dilemma she was in if she wanted a relationship with Henry: being involved with him would mean never living a normal life again. When he finally confessed to her that he was immortal and over two hundred years old, she'd initially thought that was the end of the weirdness; she knew the big secret and now they could get on with exploring what they meant to each other. How wrong she'd been. First she'd learned that he wasn't the only other immortal out there, and then she'd learned that he wasn't the only _type_ of immortal.

In short order, she'd learned that the most populous group of immortals was engaged in a kind of secret civil war that they euphemistically called the Game. They fought and killed each other, taking as their spoils the defeated Immortal's power. To Jo, they were criminals—guilty of nothing less than organized murder—with a _long_ list of secondary charges ranging from identity fraud to conspiracy to illegal disposal of human remains. To Henry, they were his friends, doing what they needed to do to survive.

And she got it. She did. After centuries of believing himself to be alone in his immortality, he'd found other people with the same condition, who could understand where he'd come from and what kind of life he lived, who shared his concerns and could appreciate his experiences. For that, he was willing to overlook the fact that they were killers; she knew he hoped that she'd be willing to do the same. So he'd taken her to meet an Immortal. She'd braced herself for someone like Kostya—an Immortal she and Hanson had been charged with apprehending after he'd killed two people in the span of a day—or Matt Adamson—an Immortal who had conveniently arrived in town in time to help capture Kostya by manipulating everyone like they were characters in a story he was writing. (She hadn't heard from either of them since then, and sincerely hoped she never would.)

Instead, she'd met Father Liam Riley, a man who appeared in be in his early 40s with curly brown hair he wore on the long side, an Irish brogue, and an intense love of basketball. Liam was thoughtful and deliberate in everything he did, yet also gave generously of himself to anyone who needed it. He couldn't live a more peaceful or caring life. It was easy to see why Henry liked him. Having learned that Liam was similar in age to Henry—similar, until she thought about their birth years and realized that Liam was actually old enough to be Henry's grandfather—made their connection more obvious; Henry had found a much-needed peer. Even better, Liam claimed to want nothing to do with the Game.

She'd also met Richie Ryan. Unlike Henry and Liam, Richie appeared to be in his early 20s—younger when he offered up one of his wicked grins. She'd had no idea that someone's appearance could be frozen at such a young age, and she'd discovered that she was much worse at understanding the difference between physical age and mental age that immortality created than she'd let herself believe.

The reasons for Henry's friendship with Richie weren't so obvious. At times, Richie was impulsive and a fast-talker, which he freely admitted had gotten him into—and out of—trouble more times than he could count. He was knowledgeable about the subjects he cared about, and not at all interested in learning for the sake of learning, as Henry was. But he was also dedicated and possessed a work ethic that belied his age. His _apparent_ age, she reminded herself, yet again.

"You're different when you're around them," Jo had commented after they'd left the schoolyard after that first meeting. Her shoulders ached from the impromptu basketball game she and Henry had gotten suckered into and her face was flushed with exertion. It had been a long time since she'd stepped out onto a court. Next time, she was going to have to remember to wear sneakers. She cast a glance back. The wall around the school kept her from seeing anything happening on the grounds, but she thought she could still hear the ringing of the hoop's chains as the ball rattled through them.

Henry looked at her with the pinched expression of a person who was trying to figure out if he should be insulted. "What do you mean 'different'? If you're referring to my athletic ability—" He twisted the handkerchief he'd been using to clean the playground grime from his hands into a tight knot.

Jo chuckled at the memory of Henry trying, and mostly failing, to score a basket. Fortunately for him, none of the rest of the players had cared about enforcing traveling rules after the first violation, or they'd have spent the whole afternoon arguing about pivoting versus walking. "Henry, I already knew your best sport was speed reading. What I mean is, you're more…I don't know…relaxed?" She knew she wasn't explaining the difference well; she wasn't sure she could explain it better. In his day-to-day life, Henry maintained an air of aloofness; he kept a distance between himself and everyone he interacted with, but it wasn't snobbery so much as fear. She thought she'd seen him let down his guard with her, only she'd had no idea how much further it could drop until she'd seen him with Liam. "I liked seeing that side of you."

"There was nothing unusual in our interaction," he responded, flicking the handkerchief flat before folding it back into a square and tucking it in his pocket. "You have always seen my authentic self, even if I haven't always been able to tell you the complete truth about my actions." A breath, then he snaked an arm around her waist and twirled her close. Jo let out a small shriek at the sudden gesture. "Now I don't have to hide that." He dipped her like they'd been dancing and graced the move with a kiss, suggesting that maybe he did have some secrets left after all.

He was different around them, though. She'd seen it on that first meeting and again on the couple other get-togethers he'd arranged so Jo could learn who and what these Immortals were directly from the source. She still didn't like the answers, but it became increasingly clear that she had to accept Richie and Liam as part of Henry's life—and she'd made the mistake of thinking she could do that by mentally disassociating them from their Game. They were immortal, and that was all.

Then Drake had walked into the diner, and Jo remembered all too clearly the body of Kostya's first victim. A young man, barely out of his teens, who'd died by having his head brutally cut off. The head and body had been abandoned, identity-less, in the wreckage of an office building with no concern for the people who would be waiting for him to come home.

She knew Richie carried a sword, though he claimed he wasn't interested in using it. Jo'd known plenty of guys—especially adolescents—who carried guns or switchblades as part of a fantasy wherein they could become heroes on the inevitable day when they were mugged or caught in a convenience store robbery. Inevitable in their minds only, both because the odds of ever needing to use the weapon were slim and because, if they did, few of them would act like heroes. It was easy to imagine Richie's sword as a weirder manifestation of the same mindset.

Until she recalled Henry's rendition of how he and Richie had met, the awe in his voice as he recounted how Richie—less than a day after losing everything he owned in an explosion—had rushed to rescue a woman he'd never met from a kidnapper. The rescue effort had included a picked lock, trespassing on private property, and, ultimately, assault of the kidnapper. All that could be understood. The part Jo struggled with was Henry's recitation of how Richie had decapitated him. Richie had calmly and easily cut off Henry's head.

 _That_ was who they were.

As Jo watched Richie and Liam sink into the stream of traffic outside the diner, it was all she could do not to breathe a sigh of relief.

Through the polarized glass of the diner window, she saw Drake, still seated in his booth. He held the menu open in front of him, his attention on selecting the lunch he said he'd come to the diner for. Her gaze shifted and she found the table she'd been sitting at. A busboy had cleaned the dishes off already and was wiping the surface with a rag. It was too late to reclaim the table, even if she had any desire to stick around. Liam had insisted on the four of them leaving the diner together, and then had promptly left with Richie. She assumed that simply exiting the building didn't end whatever danger Liam thought existed had she and Henry stayed.

"We should get moving too," she stated. She wished she had the weight of the gun at her side to assure her that they hadn't been left vulnerable. "Where are you headed? Is Abe expecting you back at the shop?"

Henry pulled out his pocket watch and checked the time, smiling at what he saw. "Not for awhile. Our brunch was somewhat shorter than I'd planned on, which gives us some time before I'm expected back and before your appointment this afternoon. Hair stylist, right?"

"You remembered."

Henry knew everything, remembered everything, so she shouldn't have been as surprised as she was.

"I do try to take note of the important things," he answered warmly. Jo had suggested the diner because it was only a couple blocks from her salon—another detail Henry had made note of; he glanced around, orienting himself on a street she doubted he'd ever been on before, then pointed himself in the direction she had to go. "Would you care to take a walk?" He held out his arm in gentlemanly invitation and Jo slipped hers through it with a smile.

"I've love to."

She liked these intimate times with him. Though they often saw each other at work, their interactions were mostly limited to the professional. Getting together after work was equally difficult because Jo's hours could be erratic and she often came home with the barely the energy left to eat dinner and fall into bed. Henry's obligations with Abe, the shop, and his research only made it more difficult to carve out meaningful time together. They were lucky to grab an evening or two a week—which had been fine for the first few months as she got used to the idea of dating someone again. Now she was used to the idea and nothing else had changed. Fishing her sunglasses from her purse, she put them on at the same time as she tilted her face toward the sun. After the chill of the overly-air conditioned diner, the warmth of the day swept over Jo and smoothed the goosebumps that'd been prickling along her arms. Here she was with Henry by her side. Maybe she didn't need more.

"So, what happened?" she asked.

"Hm?"

"With the duel you saw."

Henry's brow was furrowed, as if he couldn't believe that someone was _asking_ him to tell a story.

"Hey," she answered, reaching up to smooth the line between his eyebrows, "I barely remember anything from my childhood and that was only a few decades ago. If you've held on to the memory this long, it must have made an impression."

A smile tugged at the corner of Henry's mouth. "It did indeed." He took a moment to re-gather his thoughts from where they'd scattered when Richie and Liam had left, standing taller as he began to talk. "When I was young, my father had an apprentice. He lived with us, though we weren't permitted to interact except under very specific conditions. Thomas. His name was Thomas." The corners of his eyes crinkled at the remembered detail. "The young man he challenged was his best friend. His name..." Head tilted, he considered the past again for a moment, before giving up. "Oh, well. I suppose it no longer matters. They had both taken a shine to a young lady in town and decided to settle their dispute with a duel." A bounce in his step gave away his excitement at having an audience for his story. "Are you certain you want to hear this story?"

Jo gave a slight shake of her head. "Believe it or not, I _like_ hearing about your past—especially when we're not standing over a dead body while you're sharing it." She couldn't resist the gentle jab. "The more I learn about you, the more I realize how much there is _to_ learn."

"That is the corollary to a long life," he agreed, carefully.

"That's not what I meant." She brushed her wind-blown hair back into place, swiping at a few strands that had found their way into her mouth. "Some people, what you see is what you get. There's nothing to them. Put 'em at a crime scene and they could list the basic details of what they're looking at, but they can't pull together a big picture because they don't know how to think about how things connect to each other. You're, like, the opposite of that." She hitched her shoulder in a shrug. There'd been a lot of intensity in the day already and she didn't really want this lighter time to get bogged down. "I sometimes wonder how much of that is because of how long you've lived, and how much is because of your experiences."

Construction scaffolding closed off half the sidewalk, forcing Jo and Henry to squeeze closer together as they walked. Their shoulders brushed with each step, and with a start Jo realized that between the brunch and this walk, this was the longest they'd been this physically close in weeks.

"Yes, well…" He scratched at his cheek and glanced away. "You're getting to see the end product of those experiences. The man who had to learn from them is different than the man you know."

Jo gave a mock gasp. "Henry, are you telling me you've _changed_?" She let their shoulders bump on the next step. "Let me guess: you were so awed at how manly and tough Thomas was, and how he won the girl, that you vowed to become a master gunslinger when you grew up." A vision of Henry as a Wild West cowboy flitted through her mind, an image so at odds with his scarves and refined taste in clothes that she laughed out loud.

Henry shot her a questioning look, but Jo only shook her head; she wasn't going to try to explain it. Fortunately, he let it go. "It was formative," he agreed. "I'm afraid the only person who gained from the situation was me. Despite the issues with accuracy that dueling pistols of the era had, Thomas managed to mortally injure his friend, but not without receiving a wound himself. There was much speculation after the fact as to why these two friends would have aimed at each other instead of firing into the air, which was quite a black mark on my father's reputation. Moral weakness in an apprentice was viewed as moral weakness in his master, you see."

Jo scratched the back of her head. "Do I even want to know how you benefited?"

A twinkle came into Henry's eye. "The shot struck Thomas's arm, became infected, and turned gangrenous. His arm had to amputated. As a lesson to my brother and me about the dangers of dueling, our father insisted on us observing the procedure."

Jo's eyes narrowed as she did the math to get to the year of the story. "This…was before anesthetics, right?"

With a nod, Henry confirmed her fear about the direction of the story. "Considerably before, unless you think a shot of whisky is sufficient?"

She didn't. The grimace she couldn't restrain revealed how inadequate she thought a shot of a whisky was. God forbid she ever have to have a limb amputated in the absence of anesthetics. If it ever came to that, she'd definitely demand the whole bottle, and then probably a second or third so that she was completely insensate for as long as she could manage. The imagined scent of alcohol made her eyes begin to water. A moment later, she realized she was smelling the fumes from the salon and not some long ago operating theater. She looked up, and sighed. "We're here. I should go check in." She didn't move. Henry's arm in hers was too nice, and she still hadn't heard the end of the story. "I need to know: did the amputation go OK?"

In the wash of noon sunlight, Henry seemed to pale and lose some of his aplomb. "Let's just say that the surgeon's performance is what inspired me to pursue studies in medicine. Some people are inspired by observing masters, and some..." He grimaced, and in the look of pain Jo could almost picture him as a little boy, being forced to watch the butchery of another person and vowing to do better.

"And another piece of the mystery that is Henry Morgan falls into place," Jo quipped. She pointed at him. "I will eventually get all your secrets, not just the big ones."

"If you ever do desire a conversational centerpiece, I do know a couple people who are quite capable of becoming corpses with no lasting ill effect."

"What?" Jo blinked as what Henry was suggesting sunk in. _Ew._ Besides which, there was no world in which she wanted to know how that favor would be requested. "You know, I think we've passed that step. There are plenty of much more normal storytelling outlets we have yet to share." Such as more walks like this one, coffee dates, meet-ups at the bar.

Henry smoothly turned the courtly arm-lock into a hand-hold, and took her other hand at the same time. "That does bring us to something else I've been wanting to discuss with you. Since we have a few minutes, now would appear to be an opportune time."

The abrupt shift in topic and mood flummoxed Jo. "What's wrong?" She scrutinized Henry's expression for hint of what was happening, but he'd collected himself and was now studying her back as she was studying him. Jo shifted on her feet. "Henry?"

He stopped to take a breath, and a strange tightness gripped Jo's heart. In her experience, people only sounded so serious when they were about to deliver really bad news. This wasn’t a breakup speech, was it?

"As you know, Abraham is about to depart on a rather lengthy cruise, leaving me alone for the duration. I will, of course, be assuming responsibility for running the store in his absence, which will cut into my free hours."

“Oh.” Jo bit her lip, certain that she now knew where this was leading. She knew how to lock her emotions down, to don a completely objective mindset for dealing with crime scene where emotions would only be a liability. The walls started to click into place before she'd finished exhaling. “Well, then I guess I’ll still see you at work. No problem. We can maybe go for dinner when Abe’s back?”

Henry's gaze softened while his hold on her hands tightened. He pulled her fractionally closer. "While I do plan on taking you to dinner after Abe returns, I had something else in mind for the more immediate future. We have been seeing each other for more a year now, and I thought…”

The tightness in her chest spread, freezing her whole body. _Don't get down on one knee_ , she thought, followed immediately by _get down on one knee, already_. The last year hadn't been casual dating, as she'd understood it; it had been courting, as he did—because he was two hundred years old and he had been brought up with different manners. And now he was going to propose. She wasn't ready for this.

"I would like to spend more time with you, Jo, not less. I’ll have the apartment to myself, and while I will miss Abe’s company, I would be very glad to have yours."

The relief melted her. “So Abe’s gone, time to have the girlfriend over? When the cat's away, the mice will play? The good news is that if you're planning on throwing an epic party, you have an in with the police.” She bit her lip again, this time to stop a further barrage of words before she said anything she'd actually regret.

Henry ducked his head like the weight of his gaze had suddenly become too heavy to bear. “Some things are much easier to conduct when a man’s son is not in the next room.” His ability to look simultaneously shy and pleased with himself told her everything he wasn't saying.

“Henry, are you talking about sex?”

“I don’t want to make any assumptions. However, it would be nice to share some things that can’t be said over a dead body.”

Jo opened her mouth to say something, then shut it, in case she said the wrong thing. Their anniversary, as marked by the day Henry had told her the truth about himself, had been two weeks before. Henry had taken her out for the kind of steak dinner she couldn't afford on her own salary—candles, live orchestra, an appetizer she couldn't pronounce, and the kind of steak she'd only heard about on cooking shows—and had not given any hint of wanting to change the status of their relationship. He couldn't have asked her this, then? Why hadn't he asked her this then?

He was asking her to move in with him, sleep in the same bed as him, have sex with him. All at once. This wasn't the slow progression of an overnight stay turning into a planted toothbrush, a drawer, half the closet, and then a serious discussion about how to merge the DVD collections. He wasn't asking her to marry him, but he still could. He might, if this worked out.

Jo swallowed, and then swallowed again, her throat suddenly too dry for words. He wasn't breaking up with her, and he wasn't proposing. All she'd been able to imagine were the two extremes, and now that those were off the table, she didn't know what to think.

And she really didn't know what to say.


	4. Sunday - Richie & Liam

Richie stood inside the door and peered around the cavernous room. Folding bleachers lined the two long walls, pushed into their out-of-use position. A climbing wall stood on the opposite end, behind one of the ubiquitous basketball hoops that was currently folded up against the ceiling. The smell of wood polish and sweat socks filled his lungs. 

“You know, I made a deal with myself the first time I changed lives: no high school. I can't believe I'm back in one already.”

With a thump, Liam finished unfolding the last of the blue mats he'd been setting in place. “There's a difference between being in high school and being in _a_ high school,” he commented, without looking up. A heave and he yanked the last mat into alignment with the others. “I think your deal is safe. Think this'll be enough space to work?”

A half dozen mats were spread on the floor, defining a space about the size of the main living area in Richie's apartment. It wasn't a lot of room, but they weren't planning on doing floor routines, either. He nodded. “Should be. I've trained—and fought—in smaller places. Ceilings are usually the bigger issue.” Tilting his head back, he peered up at the rafters. A trio of climbing ropes were coiled up high, and Richie's stomach clenched in remembered nausea. Gym had been his favorite class back in his own high school days, often the only one he regularly attended—except on rope climbing days. He'd never liked heights. It might be different now that he knew he couldn't actually die if he fell; then again, he had once thrown himself out of a fifteen story window, so he knew exactly how it felt to hit the ground from a long fall. He wanted to never repeat that experience. Taking a steadying breath, he said, “Well, that won't be a problem.” Nor was it even the real issue. The buzzing of the huge fluorescent lights that prickled his ears and unease from being someplace he wasn't sure he was supposed to be were only distractions. He stepped further into the room, the exercise bag he'd brought swinging from his shoulder. “Are you sure this is safe?”

Liam straightened up then. He was already dressed in sweatpants and a worn gray t-shirt that would only be improved with a few rips. “It's Holy Ground, Rich. There isn't any place safer for us.” Tilting his head, he quipped, “Unless you're planning to take my head.”

“No! God, no.” Richie dropped the exercise bag and knelt to unpack it. The faint thrum of Holy Ground ran through him, and in the back of his mind, he heard Mac teaching him the rules of the Game. It was a short list, with “Never fight on Holy Ground” directly stated. There were only rumors about what would happen if the rule were violated, though those rumors included the words Vesuvius and Pompeii. “It's just... what if I kill you? Or you kill me? Don't sell yourself short; it could happen.”

Liam rubbed his chin, a thoughtful expression deepening the creases around his eyes. “Amanda once forced me to fight on Holy Ground. It wasn't one of the more shining moments in our relationship. The only consequence was that we had to come up with some fast excuses when we got caught. Now, neither of us killed the other. Neither of us even drew blood.”

“Doesn't sound like much of a fight,” Richie commented.

“Our swords clashed. If the rule were sensitive enough to bar all fighting, then that would have been enough.”

Rocking back on his heels, Richie brought his own thoughtful gaze on the priest. The man was almost three hundred years old, and he'd spent most of that time studying everything there was to know about the Game. “So, are you saying you don't believe that rule? Or you do believe that rule, and there's a loophole?”

With a one-shoulder shrug, Liam gave his answer. “I don't know. All I know is that nothing exploded, no natural disasters were triggered, and the world didn't end. I suspect that if there is any consequence, it's only triggered when there's a Quickening. Now—” He clapped his hands and changed the subject— “What have you brought for us?”

Richie grinned. This was his territory. “I skipped the protective gear. Figured we didn't need that.”

Liam gestured to a janitor's bucket and mop behind him that Richie hadn't noticed. “The clean-up crew is already in place in case of injury. You'll go easy on me, I hope? I never was all that good with a sword.”

“You were good enough to survive ten years in the Game,” Richie pointed out, realizing as he said it that he had no idea if Liam had ever taken a head. He'd assumed so, but only because he'd never met an Immortal past their first year who hadn't. “Which was a long time ago, so—” He pulled a pair of practice swords out of the bag first. They were shaped like katanas and made of a hard wood that matched the weight of a metal blade without the slicing ability. “We can start with these, if you want. Or use them exclusively.” Next he removed two sets of escrima sticks. Their lengths of hardwood allowed for the practice of two-handed skills that working with a single weapon did not. He'd brought them in case Liam had a change of heart about being willing to work with a sword. “Door number two,” he said, holding one of the pairs up for Liam to see. “Something from my day job.” Then, reaching back into the bag, he retrieved two short swords in their scabbards. These were the regulation US Army swords from the middle of the 18th century. “I know you were done with the Army by the time these were introduced, but I thought they might be familiar to what you know.” They were about the same length as the escrima sticks, and far deadlier.

Liam faltered at the sight of the real swords, and his breath began to speed up like he was headed for a panic attack. He squeezed his eyes shut, and Richie was just about to shove the swords back into the bag when Liam asked, “Can I?” and held out his hand.

Richie extended one of the swords hilt first toward his friend, and waited as Liam touched the silver cross around his neck and mouthed a silent prayer before accepting it. Then he busied himself with the needless task of refolding the jeans and long-sleeved shirt he'd worn for the ride over and packing them back in the side-pockets while Liam reacquainted himself with the weapon he'd once disavowed.

The _shrrk_ of the blade being pulled from the scabbard sent a thrill down Richie's spine. It was a warning signal, but also an announcement of excitement, like the starting pistol at a race. _It's only practice,_ he reminded himself. They were on Holy Ground, and he had nothing to fear from Liam. And Liam had nothing to fear from him. The laces on his shoes had come out of their holes when he'd changed, so he re-threaded them before sticking the shoes back in the other side pocket.

“It's been well-tended,” Liam commented with obvious appreciation. The edges of the double-sided blade glimmered under the gym's lights. Not a speck of rust or tarnish marred the metal. He twisted the blade back and forth, watching the steel gleam. “Where did you get it?”

“They're Matt's. I'm pretty sure he's the original owner. He's the one who suggested them.”

“Them?” Only then did Liam seem to notice that Richie had produced two identical swords. “You're not going to use your own sword?”

“Nah. I left it at home.” Because he wanted to indulge the fiction that what happened here had nothing to do with the Game. “It was hard enough lugging this bag on the bike.” The Catholic boy deep inside Richie squirmed at the lie.

Liam regarded Richie for a long moment in that eerily perceptive way he had, then gave him a deep nod. “Thank you.” He rose, twirling the sword with a dramatic flourish that belied his long absence from handling a weapon. "Next time, bring your blade. You need to be practicing with the weapon you'll use."

"Are you sure, man? We're only here for practice. For fun." Training was fun, too—even the kind Methos put him through. Once Richie had learned enough technique to not land on his ass every time he sparred with someone, all the kinds of fighting became fun. It helped that he could walk away from every session without any injuries. "I don't mind getting some practice in with a different weapon. Ya never know when you'll need to improvise."

"Bring your own sword next time. There's no need to pretend we aren't what we are…or that there isn't someone out there who's after your head."

Richie shook his head and let out a tired sigh. It was hard to get worked up about potential challengers when there were so many of them out there. "I can handle Drake." He sounded so confident, and he had a right to be—if he was only fighting for himself. The more personal connections he made, the more each fight became worth. These days he had Henry, Jo, and Liam to take care of, too. _And Emily,_ he reminded himself, _who doesn't know anything about the life you lead or what she might need to be protected from._

"Then let's make sure it stays that way," Liam answered.

"In that case, Old Timer—" Richie grinned, pushed himself to his feet, and stepped onto the mat—“let's see what you remember.”


	5. Tuesday - Henry, Jo, Reece, & Hanson

Henry entered the station with his thoughts wrapped around him like his scarf. He was a familiar face around here now, which saved him all but the most perfunctory sign-in step at the front desk, yet he still had a niggling sense that he was trespassing. The more secrets he accumulated, the more he wondered how much longer it would be before one of the dozens of officers and detectives here would notice and call him out. It was especially trying on those days when he did have something to hide.

Such as the fact that he knew whom the body discovered in a local park the previous afternoon had belonged to. A patrolling officer had found it while investigating reports of an explosion or electrical disturbance, and that had narrowed the list of possible candidates from millions to a mere handful.

To be precise, the officer _only_ found the body. The man's head was missing, presumably dumped in the river, as was his wallet. Because of this, Henry couldn't be _certain_ that the body belonged to one Franklin Drake—at least not in any way he could explain. So, until he had an independent identification to back up his own official examination, he needed to pretend that the body was just another John Doe. He'd made a point to caution Jo on this subterfuge, and she'd seemed to accept the warning, but he couldn't miss the tension that stiffened her jaw.

Jo spotted Henry immediately and leapt to her feet, rushing over to intercept him. The sleeves of her red blouse were rolled up to her elbows; a smear of ink marred the underside of her hand. The shortage of leads hadn't kept her from throwing herself into the case. "Henry, what are you doing here? What did you find?" She cast a look around the bullpen as if suspecting that her colleagues were all watching. Lowering her voice, she added, "Unless this is about—"

Henry stopped her with a motion. "This is purely a professional visit." He shrugged out of his coat and draped it over his arm, taking a moment to smooth the fabric so it wouldn't wrinkle. He'd agreed to give Jo the necessary time to think over his offer, and he would. It was hard not to be a little hurt that she hadn't jumped at the suggestion to stay with him, until he reminded himself that this was a big step for both of them. "Lieutenant Reece asked me to come down to discuss the results from the autopsy."

"Come down?" she asked. "Was there some reason you couldn't email them?" She frowned, undoubtedly thinking of several possible reasons that all boiled down to the man's former Immortality.

Henry shrugged; the in-person visit hadn't been his idea. "I assume she's interested in forming a bigger picture view of the homicide. The official forms do tend to limit speculation."

Jo stilled, her mouth pressing into a grim line. " _We_ don't know enough to speculate."

"Then I want to hear what do you know," Reece responded, from where she stood framed in the doorway of her office, her voice carrying easily over the hubbub of the police station. A few other officers paused in their activity to glance her way, checking to see if she was talking to them. Since she was looking straight at Jo and Henry, they returned to their own work, slightly more subdued. The background volume dropped noticeably.

Reece was dressed in a black suit that still had the sharp edges of recent ironing, suggesting that she had either just come in, or was on her way out. Henry surmised it was the second one. Her destination was undoubtedly the mayor's office, as strange, grisly homicides appealed to both the press and the government, for much the same reason. Reece raised her chin in a wordless invitation to Hanson, who had already risen from his desk. "My office."

"This is gonna be good," Hanson muttered. He picked up the "World's Greatest Dad!" coffee cup that had been next to his elbow, scowled at its contents, then slugged them back with a grimace.

"Need fortification?" Henry inquired. Coffee wasn't the form of liquid courage most people would choose, though the substance the police station passed off as coffee just might come close.

Hanson swept a hand over his hair—recently cut, Henry noted—then worked his face through a series of expressions like he was practicing which ones to take in the office with him. "I'm gonna need something," he grumbled back.

Squaring his shoulders, Henry led the way. Of the three of them, Reece could hurt him the least.

The four people should have been able to comfortably fit in her office. Bright sunlight streaming through the windows lit the spacious room, glimmering off the plaques that filled the walls. Without planning it, Henry, Jo, and Hanson clustered together at the base of the desk where neat stacks of paper covered the surface. Right in the middle lay a folder open to the initial police report from the case in question. Though it was upside down, Henry was still able to easily read the text. There wasn't much to read.

Reece shut her office door and lowered the blinds over the windows that looked out into the bullpen, casting a pall over the room that had nothing to do with light. She crossed quickly to her side of the desk and planted herself in front of her chair, arms crossed. Everyone held themselves taut with expectation. Reece only indulged in these kinds of confidentiality concerns when she anticipated the worst kind of bad news.

True to form, she didn't waste time. "Doctor Morgan, I assume you've had opportunity to examine our newest John Doe?"

"The preliminary work-up is done," Henry answered. "The man was decapitated by a sharp object, most likely a long knife, though the weapon has not been recovered." That much was undeniable. The why and the who were the sticking points, as they always would be in cases such as this. "At this point, a full autopsy is unlikely to tell us anything about the cause of death we don't already know."

"Do one anyway," Reece ordered. "I want everything we can get on this guy. Blood type. Childhood injuries. Whether or not his feet turned in or out when he walked. Everything." Turning to Jo, she continued, "Have you identified him yet?"

Jo blanched, her struggle with withholding information her superior had every right to know dragging like a gravity well at the pause. "No." Clearing her throat, she kept going. "No. His fingerprints weren't in the system, and so far no one's filed a missing person's report that fits his description. Without someone stepping forward, we may not have any way to identify him."

Reece nodded and rubbed her eyebrows like she was staving off a headache. "Detectives, I know you're fighting the uphill battle on this investigation, and if we don't get something concrete soon, we may have to accept that we'll never have all the answers." She glanced down at the report, tapping one finger against it thoughtfully. "In your opinion, what's the likelihood that this homicide is connected to the one in February?"

"None," Hanson promptly answered.

Reece's cheeks puffed in a sigh she managed to restrain. "The mayor seems to think that the two homicides are connected. He's already mentioned ordering a case audit if we don't put this to bed before the media runs away with it. He was quick to remind me that nothing scares off tourists faster than a crime wave."

Hanson rolled his eyes; his opinion of the mayor and his investigative skills dropped every time the man tried to interfere with a case. "First of all, we caught the last guy. Means, motive, opportunity, murder weapon, confession. That case was nailed shut."

"That's the one who got killed before he got to trial?" Reece asked, remembering. "The whole thing fell off the radar after that…" She trailed off, the question of why the media had let the police off the hook staying unasked. Sometimes the police didn't want to know all the answers. The reprieve of that small mercy didn't last long. Reece pinched her brow tighter. "So, rather than needing to say the words 'serial killer,' I now need to suggest that we're looking at a copycat?"

"If it is, it's a piss poor copycat," Hanson replied. "The only similarity between the cases we've found so far is how the vic died." His eyes narrowed in thought, then he added, "And both the vics were white males. That could be a coincidence."

"Is that your read too, Detective Martinez?" Reece inquired.

Jo threw a glance at Henry, her eyes widening in what he could only interpret as a request for help. "It's really too soon to say."

There was another possibility, one that no one in the room dared to bring up: that Kostya was the wrong guy, and the February killer was still out there somewhere. As Henry stood there, breathing in the lavender scented air of Reece's office, it occurred to him that _he_ knew Kostya was the right man—he saw no reason that his Immortal friends would lie to him about that after being so trusting with the other details of their lives—but Jo may not have the same confidence. Could she think they'd caught the wrong person?

"If I may—" Henry waited for Reece's confirmation before continuing—"I am absolutely certain the two cases are only superficially related. When Detective Hanson said there were few similarities, he was exactly right." Hanson puffed up at the compliment. A second later, his eyes narrowed in suspicion because Henry didn't often compliment him. "The first homicide happened late at night, in an isolated location. There were clear signs of fight, not to mention the considerable vandalism that was also in evidence. Whereas, the second homicide occurred in the early afternoon, in a public location—albeit one that was temporarily abandoned by a quirk of both the timing and the weather. The victim presented no struggle. He either knew his killer, or had reason to believe he could trust him—" 

The Quickening had still damaged the surrounding environs, though with only trees and water to affect, the damage had been far less noticeable than the havoc wreaked to the office building that Kostya's first victim had been found it.

"Alright, alright, I see your point." Reece flipped the file closed and pushed the whole thing off to the side. The stress that had been crackling around her eased. "I'll pass what we know on to the mayor before he 'leaks' his suspicion. The last thing I need is the media inventing a crime spree."

Henry opened his mouth to remind the assembled group of the last difference in the cases, only Hanson got their first. The man was really earning the compliments today.

"Somethin' else," Hanson added. "The last guy didn't like witnesses."

Reece blinked at him while she caught up to what he was saying. When she did, she let out a small sigh of relief. "The boy. Has he been able to give us anything?"

With a shake of her head, Jo plugged that tiniest of cracks. "Physically, he's fine," she said. "Not a mark on him. Emotionally?" She shook her head again. Sunlight glimmered off the gold of her earrings, and it was all Henry could do not to reach over to touch them. "He witnessed a murder. A particularly violent murder. He's with the child psychologist now—an old friend of mine—so she promised to let me know as soon as he says anything." Pulling her phone from her pocket, she glanced at the display. From his angle, Henry clearly saw that there were no messages. "She said kids are resilient, so…" In a rare showing of superstition, Jo crossed her fingers.

Henry bowed his head, his faith in modern psychology not as strong. Children could be resilient; in his time, he'd witnessed some remarkable examples of children successfully recovering from traumas through the dedicated efforts of extended families and churches. He'd also seen many more examples of children who'd spent the rest of their—usually short—lives broken, often turning to alcohol or laudanum to numb the pain.

He'd dedicated his life to studying the body, not the mind, so he could hardly claim expertise in the intricacies of how mental trauma healed. Maybe the psychologist could rescue the child. He had his doubts. Hanson had found the boy cowering in a tree only a few yards from Drake's body. The child was filthy and malnourished, with overgrown and matted blond hair, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans that were ripped and stained beyond salvation. A street urchin, perhaps, though only on seeing him did Henry recognize how long it had been since he'd seen one who looked so hardened. A mere century before, he'd assumed that unwanted children who lived along the edges of society were part of the natural order. Advances in social welfare, along with a radical shift in both the law and the ethos of what to do with abandoned and orphaned children, had made them a rarity—and a tragedy in their own right. This child was one who had somehow managed to slip through the cracks, and who had no reason to hope that his life could ever be otherwise. He'd been terrified, the look in his blue eyes one Henry associated with soldiers who had survived the battle, yet would never be able to leave the war behind.

"Keep me up to date," Reece said. "It sounds like whatever he can give us will be more than we have." She drew a short breath. "Hanson, I'd like to speak with you privately for a minute. Jo, Henry, thank you."

Taking the dismissal, Henry held the door while Jo exited. As she passed, his hand brushed the length of her arm and she reflexively tilted toward him. Someday they might lose this need to be close to each other; today, he only hoped that she would agree to them becoming closer.

Jo returned to her desk and sat down, then promptly popped back up and stalked off toward the department's kitchen. Her teeth worried her lower lip and a deep crease bisected her brow. As much as Henry needed to be returning to the morgue, he couldn't leave with Jo in distress.

In the kitchen, Jo bee-lined for the coffee machine, only to discover that it was empty save for a thick brown sludge which coated the bottom of the glass carafe. "What, did someone leave this thing on all night?" Jo groused, mostly to herself, before sliding the carafe back into place.

In lieu of an answer, Henry took a seat on one of the folding chairs that surrounded the kitchen table. Someone's Lean Cuisine frozen dinner cooked in the microwave, filling the air with the scent of marinara and the hint of burning plastic. Fortunately, the owner of said dinner wasn't in the room, which left Jo free to work through her concerns.

"I lied to her," Jo said, suddenly. She turned to lean against the counter, her arms crossed tight. "I looked my commanding officer straight in the face and lied."

"You withheld unverifiable information," Henry countered. It was a technique he'd come to rely on in the face of difficult-to-answer questions: tell only as much of the truth as necessary to satisfy the questioner. "Without a head, we can't access dental records or photographs. Without a wallet, we don't know what his current identification is. Without a sword…" He trailed off because he didn't know what the absence of a sword meant, only that it had to be relevant. Whomever had killed Drake had also disposed of those three items. The only method left open to the police had been fingerprinting, and that hadn't found any matches, as the killer had doubtlessly known.

The best option remaining was the boy—Tommy—, the name given by his case worker because the child refused to supply his own.

"Henry, I _lied_." Dropping her voice to a hiss that Henry had to strain to hear, Jo continued, "I'm now guilty of withholding evidence and obstructing an ongoing investigation. So I let this case go cold. What about the next time? You know there'll be a next time. The mayor's already got his eye on my department. Do you think he's going to let us get away with leaving every Game-related case unsolved?" She dropped her gaze. "How long until someone notices a pattern?" She cast a furtive glance around the kitchen and out its main door, confirming that no one had sneaked in while they were talking, or was about to. "I did not sign up to become corrupt cop."

No, she hadn't. He didn't think she was capable of being corrupted—at least not by the usual motivators.

Tilting his head, Henry really looked at Jo for the first time in weeks—which was not to say that he'd stopped looking at her. He loved her, knew every line on her face and every twist of her hair; he could describe the angle of shadows her nose and cheekbones cast under every lighting level New York City offered them. He could read her mood in the slightest posture change and had learned all the connotations to her frowns and smiles. That was the problem. Sometimes, he knew, love could be its own blindness.

He'd known that letting her into his world would be hard, but he hadn't appreciated the burden it would place on her morality. He'd chosen to bring her into the world that his immortal friends lived in because he couldn't start lying to her again after finally getting to tell her the truth. Because he loved her. As much as he wanted to use the knowledge he'd gained over two hundred years to give her quick and simple answers to her questions, he couldn't. If anything, a long life had taught him that black and white answers were hard to come by. 

Henry scrubbed a hand over his face, feeling the rasp of the stubble on his chin. “Jo, is this really a route you want to pursue? Drake was an Immortal. We have already learned the inefficacy of trying to judge their actions through standard law enforcement procedures.”

Jo crossed to the table and planted her hands flat on the surface, leaning in. “Come on, Henry. You were there. You saw the body. Did Drake look like he was killed in a duel? Because last I checked, people didn't duel while relaxing on a park bench. Murder is a felony offense, no matter who does it: mortal or immortal. We have been over this topic, and I agreed to not raise a stink about your friends' past indiscretions, as long as they agreed to follow the laws the rest of us have to obey, or at least put on a convincing show of doing so. I can look the other way on the weapons violations and the identity fraud. I cannot look the other way on murder.”

The microwave dinged and shut off; from inside, the newly cooked dish sizzled faintly. Jo started toward it like it was her lunch, then caught herself and swung back to hear Henry's response.

Henry only distantly noticed these details, he was so shocked by what she'd pointed out. He had seen Drake's body, both at the park and on his table. The Immortal's head had been cut off, rendering him completely dead. There was indisputable evidence of a Quickening. To him, that meant the Game had been played. He hadn't given any thought to the inconsistencies of the crime scene. Why hadn't he? Was he so consumed in waiting for Jo's answer that he wasn't giving due attention to his work? The possibility alarmed him.

At last, Henry managed a response that wouldn't condemn anyone. He could never admit what a basic blunder he'd made, yet he had made it. "Why don't you talk to Richie? Maybe he can offer some insight."

Jo's shoulders hunched like she was getting ready to argue, then relaxed again. "You know, that's not a bad idea." She straightened up and started toward the door, motioning for Henry to follow her. "You coming?"

As much as he wanted to, Henry didn't want her to think he was crowding her, and he didn't trust himself not to press her for an answer before she was ready to give one.

"I'm afraid my services are required at the OCME. Lt. Reece has presented me with a substantial to-do list." Standing up, he brushed the wrinkles from his trousers, and gave Jo a smile meant to ease the sting of his rejection. "Please do let me know what you learn." He hesitated, realizing how stilted he sounded, and tried again. "Would you call me tonight when you're home?"

Jo waited for him to catch up, then gave him a small kiss on the cheek. "I can't wait."


	6. Tuesday - Richie & Jo

Leaning back in his desk chair, Richie kicked his feet up on the desk, careful to avoid the laptop and the stacks of paper that had accumulated there. His thoughts were all over the place today, which made the empty Word page on his screen all the more difficult to deal with. He had a grant request to fill out, the usual paperwork that came from trying to run a business, the not-so-usual paperwork that came from trying to backstop his identity to make it more secure, and now plans to make for the weekend.

Emily was coming!

They'd met only a few weeks before in line for coffee at the mall. At the time, Richie hadn't been interested in doing more than getting some necessary, if unpleasant-by-its-nature, shopping finished. He'd still ended up with her number. After a conversation with Methos that had opened Richie's eyes to a few realities of Immortal life, Richie had decided to call her. They'd chatted a lot since then, but aside from a single afternoon when Richie had ridden out to her college, they hadn't spent any time together in person. And now she was coming to New York City to attend a weekend music festival—with him.

Three whole days. Together.

The musical festival would fill most of the hours, but not all of them. And in case they got tired of the festival—or it turned out to be a bust—he wanted to have some backup plans in place.

And, oh, god, Emily was coming. They'd planned on her staying at his place to save money, only that brought its own problems, because Richie'd stupidly made the offer without thinking through any part of what having his hopeful new girlfriend see the way he lived might actually mean. He dropped his head back and began to mentally berate himself for losing all his good sense _again_ when faced with a pretty girl who needed his help. He was going to grow out of this someday, right? He had to grow out of this someday.

Distantly he registered the sound of the outer door opening—possibly any of the other building occupants passing through—and then the dojo door clanged open and footsteps clicked across the floor.

"No shoes on the mat," Richie called out reflexively. From his seat in the office he couldn't see the front door. Most people would say that was a careless security risk in this neighborhood, since it gave him no time to see an attacker before they were on him. Given the reality, he thought it was more important not to be distracted by everyone who came and went through the door.

He heard a pause, and then the sound of hard heels treading across the padded floor. The person was at least trying to be careful, but he still pulled his feet down and sat up, donning a more professional posture as he got ready to reprimand whoever stepped into his office. Parents sometimes stopped by to tell him in person that their child couldn't attend class or to drop off payment. Prospective customers also came by in person to see a class. All he knew for sure is that the person wasn't Immortal, so he left his sword where it was propped in the corner.

A moment later, Jo knocked on the partially open door and let herself in without waiting for an answer. "You busy?"

Richie took in her open blazer that revealed the gun holstered at her side and the badge pinned to her belt, then diverted his gaze to the laptop that he'd only touched enough over the last hour to keep awake. "Not really," he admitted. Jo was here on official business, and he didn't know why. His old instincts that made him wary of police attention prickled at his nerves even as he closed the screen. "What's this about?"

She could have come all the way in, taken one of the seats he had available. His office was utilitarian: a desk, a surprisingly comfortable desk chair for himself, two folding chairs for the customers, and a small bookcase that would someday display the trophies he or his students won in competitions. It was all he needed to run the dojo's office, so it was all he bothered to replace after his old one blew up. Instead, Jo nudged the door shut behind her. 

"I had some questions I was hoping you could answer," she said.

The click of the door closing had a disturbing finality. No one would be interrupting them; no one was at risk of overhearing them. That could only mean she was here about something Immortal-related. "OK? Such as?"

Jo pursed her lips for a moment, tapping the manila folder she held against her thigh like she hadn't expected that answer and didn't know what to say next. "Like, where were you yesterday between noon and two p.m.?"

 _Great, perfect. So, it was_ that _kind of Immortal business._

Richie pushed back in his chair and folded his arms over his stomach, unable to restrain the defensiveness a lifetime of being on the wrong side of the authorities' attention had taught him. He, at least, managed to keep his sarcasm in check. "Here, mostly."

"Mostly?"

"The dojo opens at noon on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I opened. Taught the class that meets at 12:30. Then I ran down to the drug store for some Hot Pockets and Gatorade."

Jo blinked, visibly struggling with that revelation. "You eat Hot Pockets? Someone as fit as you are?"

Of all the facts about his life he thought Jo would have trouble with, his diet was not one of them. Richie shrugged. "Call it a perk of Immortality. Junk food can't kill me, so I figure why not enjoy it? Besides, sometimes calories are more important than anything else. You gonna tell me why it matters where I was, or did you just want to talk about the eating habits of Immortal teenagers?" OK, so some sarcasm always managed to get through.

Jo flipped the manila file folder onto his desk. It slid across the rest of his papers and only his quick reflexes allowed him to catch it before it slid onto the floor. "I want to know what you know about this."

Richie's brow crinkled in confusion and he eyed the folder. Its blank cover gave no hint of its contents.

Jo made an impatient gesture at the file.

Inside lay a photograph that, at first, Richie's eyes couldn't parse. He thought it was a fashion plate of some kind, maybe a mannequin, advertising an expensive suit. He caught the black of the jacket and trousers, the white button-down shirt, the blue tie—seeing each of them as discrete items that had no relation to each other. Richie raised a questioning eyebrow at Jo.

"That's Franklin Drake," she supplied. "Or, what's left of him. I know it's hard to identify someone without their head, as I figure you know. His body was found yesterday—"

"Around two?" Richie asked. Jo nodded, and Richie looked again at the picture. Knowing what the image was, he still couldn't swear whom the body belonged to, but now it looked like a body. And the tie was familiar. He tried to dredge up recollection of a distinctive watch or freckle or anything and found that nothing came to mind. If Jo had asked for an identification a few weeks or months from now, there was a good chance Richie would've forgotten all about Drake. That happened when it _was_ every day that someone was trying to kill you. "So, someone took his head, after all." He started to close the file, then remembered who Jo was and what she was likely doing there. "Wait, you don't think I did it, do you?"

Jo gave him a look that told him the thought had crossed her mind. "Right now, you're the only person I know who _could_ have done it."

"Yeah, well you're wrong. We agreed not to fight, and nothing happened to change that." He knew he was being defensive, but Jo had barged in and all but accused him of breaking his word. "I didn't do it."

For his honesty, Richie received only a long, patient stare. So many lesser cops had tried that on him. Once he would have leapt to fill the silence with whatever he thought would get him off the hook. Since he wasn't guilty this time, he managed to hold his tongue.

"I know," she answered, at last. "You wouldn't have wanted to get your, ah, sword dirty." Her gaze flicked toward the item, leaving no doubt what she meant.

Sheer indignation stole Richie's response. She thought he had sent someone else to kill Drake? Like it was some kind of hit? He started to rise from his chair, and Jo pressed back against the door, her hand flinching toward her gun. 

They both froze. Tension wound through the room like a foul odor, feeding on their old, familiar roles of cop and criminal. Richie pulse pounded hard in his jaw; he saw Jo's throbbing on alternating beats in the vein in her forehead.

But he wasn't a criminal anymore, and he needed to stop acting like one.

"You know better than that," he said, settling back. He spoke as calmly as he could. "You know _me_ better than that. I fight when I have to; I've never denied that. I also try not to ever have to." He'd tasted the thrill of being an active player in the Game, and then spent years afterward trying to figure out how to live with himself. The power wasn't worth the price.

With a sigh, Jo deliberately tucked her hands behind her back and shifted to a more comfortable parade rest. "I know," she answered, dropping her gaze. "I'm sorry."

That gave Richie pause. He let the file fall to the desk again, the picture open in front of him. A neck without a head on it never looked right, no matter how many times he'd seen it. Not that it was supposed to. But the eye was so drawn to faces that when it followed the line of a neck up and didn't find a face to continue on to, he always sensed that the problem was with him and not the body. 

"You believe me?"

"I have to. You have an alibi," she answered, simply. "A solid one, too. It's not even worth my time to check it. What I need to know is who did kill him?"

Richie made a face. "Couldn't tell ya."

"Can't, or won't?"

"Jo, I don't know where you got the idea that I have some kind of inside line on what every Immortal in the City is doing. Hell, I don't even know how many Immortals _are_ in the City. It's not like we have some kind of secret club we meet at in between trying to kill each other. All I know is Connor's not gonna be happy when he hears that the Game is active here again." He glanced down at the picture again, his eye still trying to find the rest of the body, which made him miss the expression that went with the strange noise Jo made.

"Connor? As in Connor MacLeod?" She swept in then, coming right up to the desk.

"That's him." When Richie looked up, he had to tilt his head back to see Jo's face. She looked stricken, the harsh overhead lighting casting dark shadows under her eyes that no amount of makeup could cover. "Why do I feel like I just said the wrong thing? And how do you know who Connor is? That wasn't even the name he used here."

Catching herself again, Jo pulled back so that she wasn't looming across the desk at him. Did she know how close to the edge she was around him? "I've heard the name." She swallowed, then brushed a hand over her face. "He's…he's _real_?"

"Yeah. Very. Larger than life and with an ego to match his reputation," Richie answered. "Helluva fun guy to drink with, though. If you and Henry ever take a trip to Europe, let me know and I'll introduce you." He'd only had the experience once, himself, and he'd been too intimidated then to fully appreciate the experience. Most of what he knew about drunk Connor came from Duncan's stories. A part of him thought that might be safer.

Rather than being thrilled, Jo seemed to deflate at the offer and she sounded like she meant the opposite when she answered, "I'll keep that in mind." She blew out a breath that fluttered her bangs. "What do you mean he won't be happy? "

On the same day Richie had met Emily, he'd also learned that by choosing to relocate to New York City, he'd set himself up to maintain the legacy that Connor had left—namely, keep the Game from taking over the City. It was proving a lot more difficult than Richie had thought—and he'd thought the task would be damned near impossible.

"It's not important. At least, it's nothing you need to worry about. The Game's my problem, remember?"

"When the bodies are left in my jurisdiction, it's my problem too," she reminded him. "We might even be on the same side for this one. D'you see the other picture?" She motioned again at the file.

Richie hadn't noticed that the file had multiple pages in it. He slid the top one out of the way to reveal the second. Like the first one, it was deceptively innocent. This was a crime scene photo, but it looked like a nihilistic commentary on an idyllic park scene. A man was sitting on a bench. Broken peanuts were scattered at his feet and a small bag of whole ones rested against his thigh. The viewer saw a business man enjoying a respite in a hectic day to feed the squirrels and take in nature—until the eye finished traveling up to body to the truncated neck. The businessman had lost his head for nature? The symbolism needed work, but the surreal effect was the same. 

Richie preened for a second at having retained enough art appreciation skill from his days living with Tessa and Duncan to have that kind of analysis, before the horror of the image hit him.

"This is how you found him?"

Grabbing the picture, he held it up to the light, twisting it one way and another, as if the action could shift the details.

Jo hadn't answered, so Richie flipped the photo around and shoved it at her, mentally begging her to tell him it wasn't real. It couldn't be real. "Jo?"

"So I was right," she answered. "Drake was murdered."

Richie heard the distinction in her word choice and nodded sharply. "Someone ambushed him. He didn't die as part of the Game." He sunk back in his chair, trying not to think about what that meant: Unless there'd been another Immortal around--he hoped there'd been another Immortal around—Drake's Quickening had been lost. His memories, experiences, power … all gone. There was no worse fate. The photo crinkled in his grip.

"Now do you think you can tell me who did it?" She was fishing, and for once Richie didn't rise to the bait.

"I still don't know." Oh, how he wished he did know. Up until that moment, Drake had meant nothing to him. Immortals died in the Game; that's what happened. When friends or lovers, teachers or students got killed, some Immortals made a point of hunting down their killer and avenging the death. A cynical person—such as Methos, for example—might suggest that that's how the Game had started: someone avenging a lover's death and kicking off a cycle of retribution that could never end. Until there was no one left to fight.

No one would risk his own life seeking vengeance for a stranger—except in a situation like this. All Richie's nerves and anticipation about the impending visit vanished. If there was someone out there killing Immortals without a fair Challenge, Richie had to stop them. He met Jo's eyes, equal to equal. "But if I find out," Richie stated, "I'm going to kill him. I don't care if he's in your jurisdiction."

Jo's eyes narrowed and her lips spread into a thin line that told him he'd gone too far. The promise he'd made outside the diner had broken like a dropped iPhone. When she responded, it was as someone retracting the fragile truce offered about the two of them being on the same side. "And I'll have to stop you," she vowed.


	7. Tuesday - Richie & Methos

Teaching the afternoon classes occupied Richie enough that he couldn't give attention to the anxiety bubbling within him. He felt a deep crease etch itself between his eyes, and once or twice he caught his teeth grinding together, but he managed to stay upbeat for the kids, which was more important than pondering how Drake had died. It also let him put some distance between what he'd learned and how he felt about it.

As soon as the last kid left, he threw his laptop and the small amount of cash that had trickled in that day into the safe under his desk, grabbed his sword, and locked the whole dojo down. Still in his _gi_ , he padded up the stairs to his apartment, each step feeling heavier and heavier. How did trouble keep finding him like this? It always did, but he still managed to be unprepared when it did.

At the door, he paused long enough to say "it's me" before letting himself in. It was a useless courtesy. Methos was ensconced on the sofa with his legs crossed, laptop resting on his lap. A faint thumping of some rock beat eked from his earbuds. The open can of beer resting on the arm and the two empties on the floor told Richie that Methos hadn't moved from this position in a while. Whatever he was doing, even the presence of another Immortal wasn't enough to disturb him.

Richie shut the door and started toward his bedroom to put the sword away, and that got a reaction. With the smoothest of movements, Methos reached between the sofa cushions and pulled out a gun. He had it aimed before looking up from his screen long enough to see that the flash of sword he'd caught in his peripheral wasn't a threat.

"Really?" Richie asked. He kept the sword lowered, though the urge to see if he could be fast enough to block a bullet tightened his grip on the hilt.

Methos yanked out the earbuds; the beat grew louder and the tinny lyrics of some Led Zeppelin song that Richie recognized—but couldn't place—trickled out. "You should know better," he warned. "I could've shot you."

"And then you would've had to buy me a new _gi_ ," Richie countered. "Dude, I warned you at the door, like always. Try turning your music down." Heedless of the weapon still pointed at him, he continued to his room where he stowed the sword under his bed and quickly changed into the khaki shorts and a t-shirt that he'd started off the day in. That brief transitional time was enough to kick his worry back into gear. He grabbed a comb and ran it through his hair, noting that it was only damp enough to have gone extra curly. Sometimes he showered after class; today, he had more pressing concerns. "Does the name Franklin Drake mean anything to you?"

There was a moment of silence, presumably while Methos again removed his earbuds, then a dismissive, "No. Should it?"

Richie emerged from his bedroom to see that the gun was put away and the laptop set aside. Methos sat on the couch with his legs crossed, his bony knees poking out from under the towel he'd thrown across his lap to keep the heat of the laptop from being too uncomfortable. "I don't suppose you've taken any heads recently?" As soon as he heard the adverb, he knew it was the wrong one.

Cocking his eyebrow, Methos immediately called him on it. "By 'recently' do you mean the last century or the last millennium?"

"Only you would think that either of those qualify," Richie groused. "Let's say the last twenty-four hours."

"Nope." Methos clicked the keyboard and the music cut off entirely. "I'm going to guess that your two questions are related and Franklin Drake is someone who lost his head…yesterday?"

"Yesterday afternoon," Richie supplied.

Methos nodded and straightened up, revealing that the white undershirt he wore was wrinkled like it had been slept in, which meant he probably hadn't moved from that spot since Richie had first headed down to open the dojo that day. What was he so engrossed in? "Since I didn't it do and you didn't do it—"

"Hey, what makes you so sure I didn't do it?"

Methos gave Richie a long once-over, then grinned. "Remind me to teach you when you're older."

He'd walked right into that one; not only had Richie confirmed that he hadn't taken Drake's head, now he was going to wonder if there really was some way for an Immortal to sense if another had recently taken a Quickening. Though, he couldn't imagine why that might be useful. With a groan, Richie headed to the kitchen for a glass of water. 

"The _cops_ thought I did it," he said. Strangely, that made him feel vindicated. The improvement to his mood only lasted a second; there was no ice in the freezer because _someone_ had replaced the trays without refilling them. Richie took them out and left them on the counter in protest. Warm water was still wet, so he filled a tall glass and drained it.

"The police?" Methos unfolded himself from the couch and carried his laptop over to their small kitchen table, which doubled as the charging station, and plugged it in. "As in one attractive detective who knows more about us than she should?"

"Martinez," Richie said. "Yeah, her."

"So, what did you tell her?"

"That I didn't do it. She didn't believe me." Richie filled the glass a second time, but didn't drink from it. Methos had left the screen on his laptop canted open, so Richie carried his water over to the table and sat down while trying to get a look at what was on it. The pale light of the screen glimmered off the surface of the wooden table. "She's got this idea that I'm, like, some kind of Immortal crime-boss mastermind." He paused a moment to process the incongruity of that. He could barely run his own life and now Jo thought he was responsible for dictating other people's? He should bring her up to see any conversation with Methos, and then she'd see that Richie wasn't the threat she thought. Why hadn't he thought of that before? A familiar logo on the screen caught his attention; it was for the company that owned his building and a number of others in the area. "Are you apartment hunting?" What little Richie could see on the computer looked like a real estate listing.

Reaching over, Methos closed the lid and the topic with a sharp, "No."

"Yeah, well you might want to think about it before Martinez decides you're the next suspect. I hear Canada's nice." Methos had moved in with the promise that he was only going to stay a little while. As Richie had quickly learned, they had very different definitions of what "a little while" meant.

"You obviously convinced her of your innocence or you'd be in jail right now, so who cares who took out this Drake? Odds are, it was a routine Challenge." Methos crossed to the sofa and began retrieving his used cans. Five steps from kitchen table to living room sofa, Richie counted. The apartment had seemed so much bigger when he was living in it alone.

"Yeah, except that it wasn't."

"So it was a vendetta." Methos stooped down to pick up a can that had started to roll under the sofa and had somehow managed to get wedged behind the leg. "That's even better, as the guy probably won't be interested in further hunting."

Richie sighed, letting his head drop back. The fixture over the table was a glass hemisphere tainted yellow from years of smokers sitting beneath it. He was suddenly tempted to take it down and give it a good bleaching. Instead, he forced himself to give voice to his real fear. "You're not listening. Drake wasn't killed in a Challenge. It was…I think…a mortal killed him." He heard the abrupt cessation of movement as Methos took in what he'd said, then the crunch of aluminum, a sword-strengthened grip crushing a helpless metal can.

"That's not an accusation to make lightly." Methos' voice came from near the floor and sounded like it was about to rear up and strike. Richie had never heard that tone before, had never seen this Methos before. If Jo saw this one, it would become impossible to ever convince her that no one was in charge of the Game.

He scrambled back, seeking to get out of range. Who knew what weapons the man kept under the couch? The kitchen chair rocked back and crashed into the floor as he lunged to keep the water glass from tipping over and spilling its contents all over the keyboard. A few drops splashed on the table and Richie swiped them off before they could get on the computer. "Don't you think I know that?" It took twelve steps to cross to the window, and that included the wide berth he gave the still kneeling Methos. "I was right there when Horton and his followers were taking out the Immortals in Paris. It was a helluva time to find out I was one of the people he wanted to kill." Not that they'd showed any interest in him except as a way to get to Mac.

"I was right there, too," Methos reminded him, coldly. "On the other side of the fence, as it were."

"That's right," Richie said, slapping his forehead. "I forgot about that." While he knew Methos had been working as a Watcher, it hadn't clicked that he had also been right at the center of where the splinter group known as the Hunters had operated—mostly because they didn't meet until two years later on another continent. "They didn't…try to recruit you, did they?"

Finally standing, Methos carried his cans to the recycling bin and dropped them in one by one, giving Richie plenty of time to imagine the clusterfuck of the world's oldest living Immortal masquerading as a Watcher being recruited by the Hunters in order to kill other Immortals whom the Watchers had deemed too dangerous to let live. The veins in his temples throbbed in protest, while a more cynical part of him—one that spoke in Methos' voice, of all things—pointed out what a clean circle it was. Plus it was a handy way to rack up Quickenings, if that's what someone wanted to do. Though, arranging the kill so that none of the other Hunters saw the Quickening could be tricky.

"Suggestions were dropped my direction," Methos responded. "I worked very hard to be too obtuse to get them."

"Yeah, I guess you would've had to." Which meant they both knew too well what could happen when mortals tried to involve themselves in the Game. "So lemme ask you: You think it's starting up again?"

Methos went quiet for a span of breaths, the silence broken only by the rumble of traffic that filtered up from the street below. "It wasn't the first witch hunt, and it won't be the last." He dropped the last can into the bin and slammed the lid shut. "Let's start with why you think it could be. What was so unusual about Drake's death?"

Closing his eyes, Richie summoned his memory of the crime scene photo. He described the pose Drake had been in, his arm slung across the back of the bench, which is what had kept him upright after he died. The peanuts. The lack of footprints, bloodstains, or other indication of a fight on the ground. The more details he remembered, the harder his heart started to pound. The Game, he could handle. It had identifiable players and established rules. He could choose to fight, or to run. Mortal hunters were infinitely more dangerous because they could be anyone—and they didn't follow the rules. "I'm going to hafta call Emily and cancel," he concluded, aware of both his non sequitur and the fact that he was latching on to the least important problem, though as least canceling their weekend was something he could _do_. "I don't know what I'm going to tell her. She'll probably never talk to me again."

This was why he didn't date, because girls didn't like to be lied to, and despite all the practice he'd had, he didn't like doing it.

"You are not," Methos countered. "Dropping everything at the first hint of a problem is the fastest way to make yourself a target. Before we do anything at all, let's make sure you're not misreading the situation."

Richie'd been on his own so long that he thought he'd grown past the defensive knee-jerk reaction. Between the way Jo had treated him and this, he discovered otherwise. "Misreading it _how_? Drake wasn't Challenged." He was whining. He was too old to whine. Bracing his hands on the window ledge, he pressed his forehead against the glass and peered out, searching for some point of familiarity in the always moving, always changing city he'd chosen to live in.

"No, based on what you said, I agree. But he wouldn't be the first Immortal killed by someone he trusted, either." As ominous as hearing it was, Richie knew that Methos only spoke the truth. The possibility existed at the base of every Immortal relationship, no matter whether they were friends, lovers, or student-teacher; no matter how long they'd known each other; no matter how strenuously they swore otherwise. And when it did happen, no one was really surprised. Methos tapped his fingers on the counter, lost in thought for a moment before suggesting, "It could also have been suicide."

Suicide. That almost fit with Drake's behavior at the restaurant, how he hadn't been interested in a fight until he'd learned who Richie was. If he'd thought he would definitely lose, that could have been tempting for someone who wanted to die, yet wasn't willing to simply kneel down.

"Before we do anything else," Methos continued, still sounding thoughtful, "we need to get more information. Do you think the detective would let you borrow those pictures? I want to take a look at them."

Jo? Let him walk off with police evidence? He'd asked her downstairs and been soundly informed that police property had to stay in police custody. Richie snorted. "Not a chance." But Jo wasn't his only way in to this case, was she? "I'll ask Henry."

With a nod, Methos put that topic to rest as well. "Out of curiosity: is there anyone in this city you haven't told about Immortals?"

"They're the only ones I _have_ told. Well, and, Henry's s—roommate Abe. Three people. _Emily_ doesn't even know." Richie turned back, and immediately brought a hand up as to shield his eyes. "Geez, man, put on some clothes." He'd caught that Methos was wearing an undershirt, and missed that he was also sitting—now standing—around in his boxers. When he was Death, Methos might have preferred a pale horse and cowl; as Matt, he seemed to prefer underwear, unless forced to put on more. Richie did not need to subject Emily to that.

"Right," Methos continued, as if Richie hadn't commented on his state of undress, "and Emily is coming to the music festival, and—I'm guessing—is going to be staying here. You were planning to mention this at some point?"

Richie splayed his hands in a silent 'no one's perfect.' Besides, it was his name on the lease. One of his names, anyway. "She only confirmed a couple hours ago. I'd barely ended the call when Jo came in and started throwing accusations at me." He pulled a deep breath, trying not to let himself get riled up again. Too many worlds were colliding. "I thought Emily could stay in my room and I'll sleep on the couch." He nodded toward the relevant furniture. "It's just for the weekend, and we're not…I mean…" His lip curled up in a snarl at himself for all the stumbling. Regardless of what age he looked, he wasn't a kid and he didn't need Methos' approval. "We're still getting to know each other."

Methos regarded him for a second, then idly picked up the ice-cube trays and dropped them in the recycling bin next to his beer cans. "Then I guess we'd better get our stories straight so she doesn't start catching you in lies before she's even in the door." Glancing at the clock, he seemed to finally notice that the evening was well advanced. "I'm going to take a shower. Order a pizza or something?" He started toward his room. At the door, he stopped and looked back. "And when you get to the point with Emily where you need to explain things, let me know; I'll be very happy to shoot you." The door swung shut behind him.

"I'm sure you would be," Richie responded to the plank of wood. He ran a hand over his head. The thick curls of his youth caught his fingers. In another few months, he'd be able to start cutting them back again—only the shorter his hair got, the less time he had in this life—If he had any time at all. Once Jo figured out that Richie hadn't made an idle threat, all the work he'd put into helping her understand the Immortal life was going to be sacrificed, too.

Until then, he needed to: Make sure he lived long enough to get to the barber. Call Henry and get the pictures. Call for dinner. His eyes settled on the crack between the sofa cushions and he sighed. He'd also have to Emily-proof the apartment. If he was going to bring her into his life, he wanted to make it as un-frightening as possible—and that started with hiding the weapons. Another sigh, and he went to retrieve the ice-cube trays before he threw them out by accident.


	8. Tuesday - Jo, Hanson, and Henry

Hanson came awake when Jo pulled the door handle of the car. He'd locked the door while he was sleeping, which left Jo impatiently standing on the street next to a police car while he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, blearily looked around, and finally captured enough coherence to hit the unlock button. Next time she was taking the keys with her when she left him alone. The neighborhood Richie had chosen to live and work in was not the kind that welcomed a police presence, which Jo keenly felt in the suspicious stares being leveled at her from people who had all vanished from sight when the police car pulled up. Since she had more-than-one childhood memory of pressing her nose to a window while blue and red lights swirled below, waiting to see whose turn it was to get escorted into the vehicle, and understood the attitude. She'd only come here for information, though, so she ignored the stares and pulled the car door open, shaking her head in fond exasperation at her partner.

"D'you have a good nap?" she asked dryly. A blast of cold air hit as she slid into the passenger seat. In deference to the outside temperature, and the desire to not cook to death in his own vehicle, Hanson had left the engine on with the air conditioning turned up full. Jo shivered and adjusted the controls, then gave up and rolled down the window. She definitely wasn't leaving him alone with the keys in the future, if she ever had to come back here on the job. He could wait in the hallway. She was sure that would go over well with him.

Oblivious to the reason for the grin that she suddenly had to fight back, Hanson squinted at her with reddened eyes. "When you get to be my age," he said, "every nap is a good nap. Wouldn't've said no to another 10 minutes, though. You weren't in there very long."

Hadn't she been? She felt like hours had passed, but a quick check of the dashboard clock against her watch confirmed that Hanson was right.

"It was long enough. I found out what I needed to know." She leaned an elbow on the top of the door and looked toward the dojo. The glass windows lining the front were protected by a metal security screen that made it hard to see inside. She caught the shadow of the large punching bag and a human-like shadow she figured had to be one of the dummies. There was no movement. Richie was either still in his office or he'd slipped out right after she did. She knew which one it was. Anyone else would be running around panicked after a visit like that; Richie was just getting on his with day. Was he really innocent, or merely confident in his ability to lie? He was tricky: at times charming, at times arrogant, and at times wildly insecure. As much as a part of her wanted to have nothing to do with him or his world, a bigger part was fascinated by this person who managed to live in it and stay so likable. And as a resource for his kind of Immortal, he was invaluable. Like it or not, she was going to have to keep an eye on him. But, not today.

"We're done here," she said, and patted the dashboard like she was encouraging a horse to get moving.

Hanson gave his eyes a final rub and started back toward the station. At each light or turn he shot her a sideways glance and drew a short breath as if to ask a question. He didn't know about Immortals, didn't know whom Jo had gone to interview or what she'd hoped to learn. The curiosity was clearly eating at him. He got several turns into the route before saying, "Well, you gonna fill me in? You drag me to go tearing off to talk to your snitch, there's gotta be something you thought he'd be able to shed light on."

"I didn't drag you," Jo countered. She was turning Richie's words and reactions over in her mind, searching for the misstep or the half-truth. Instead, all she found was more reason to be worried. He hadn't shown any concern for Drake's death until he saw the picture, and then he'd turned so serious—so deadly serious—that she didn't recognize him. It was a frightening transformation, made more so by the fact that she'd provided the catalyst for it. He didn't know who killed Drake. _"But if I find out, I'm going to kill him,"_ he'd sworn. The undertone in his words echoed through her mind, so she was talking on autopilot when she said, "You insisted on coming along."

"Because you don't go anywhere without your partner."

Jo flinched and dragged her attention back to the person next to her. Hanson was right and they both knew it. The only reason she'd ever considered going alone was because of the nature of the meeting; Jo saw no reason knowing about Immortals would improve his life, so she wanted to keep him out of it. Though, on consideration, she'd pay a lot of money to have someone secretly record Hanson's reactions to one of her conversations with Richie or Liam—if she could delete his memory of it afterward. He could learn about them. But not Henry. She never wanted him to know about Henry. That seemed way too personal.

"Admit it," she teased, hoping to trick herself into a lighter mood, "you only came along because you wanted to catch some z's while on the clock."

He was only willing to go along with it so far. "Yeah, yeah. So, what'd you get? A name? Tell me you got a name?"

Jo'd planned on saying that she hadn't learned anything because, really, confirmation that Drake had been murdered would only get her teased. In the absence of an ill-timed sheet of falling glass or a spinning boat propeller, a beheading couldn't be anything else. Now she saw an opportunity she hadn't imagined. "I did get a name," she said. She never had to mention that she already knew it. "Franklin Drake."

Hanson let out a low whistle. The offering of solid information did more for his mood than any friendly teasing. "Of the West Side Drakes? That would explain the fancy duds and…who in the hell names their kid Franklin? What's wrong with Frank? Good solid name. Frank. Not a name I've heard much recently, though. I bet it's some kind of shared name. What'd'ya wanna bet he was Franklin Drake the _third_." He said the last in a faux-English accent that Jo belatedly realized had to be Hanson's idea of what Henry sounded like.

"I guess we'll find out when we run it. Somehow, I think he was a loner." The temperature in the car had stabilized, so Jo pulled her arm in and rolled the window back up. The noise from outside dimmed and without the competition, the rest of what Hanson had said sunk in. "Who're the West Side Drakes?" She thought she knew all the big name families in the City, but this was one she hadn't encountered.

A quick shake of his head and Hanson admitted, "I made 'em up. Name like that has to belong to someone hoity-toity. You sure your snitch wasn't pulling your leg?"

"Pretty sure," she stated with a confirming nod. She'd heard Drake speak his name herself, not that Hanson would ever know how she could be so certain. "Are you _jealous_ that I learned something useful before you did?"

"Me?" He slapped a hand over his chest. "I don't get jealous. Solving a case is a team effort. But, hey, if you want to do all the work, be my guest. You know where to find me when it's time to dish out the credit."

"If you're sleeping, I'll be sure to wake you up. If I hafta do all the work, what's a little nudge…or a glass of cold water on your face?" She flashed him a grin, and couldn't miss that he was grinning too. They hadn't teased each other like this in a long time. The reason for his true insistence on coming along suddenly made sense to her. Ever since February, Jo had been so caught up in making sense of what these Immortals were and why they were suddenly all over New York City that she'd inadvertently distanced Hanson. He was worried about her. She smiled again, softer, and touched his arm in reassurance. "Speaking of doing all the work, I'm going to call the name in and get dispatch on it."

Hanson nodded in approval. "Good idea. Partner."

Jo barely had the call in when her cell phone rang.

"I have good news and bad news," the speaker stated as her greeting. Though the ID stated that the caller was private, the roughened voice like that of a long-time chain smoker identified her as Rhonda Syzmanski, a friend of Jo's from her school days and now a specialist with the police department who worked exclusively with child witnesses whose needs demanded them to be kept out of the general welfare system. Currently, she was in charge of Tommy, the witness to Drake's killing.

"I'm fine," Jo responded. "Doing great. Thanks for asking. How are you?"

Rhonda only chuckled, not at all repentant about skipping pleasantries to get right to work; she'd always been like that.

Jo didn't cross paths with Rhonda much, either personally or professionally. Every time they did, they both wondered why they didn't get together more, and both swore to make a greater effort. The effort never quite panned out. "I'd tell you which news I wanted to hear first, but I'm going to guess it doesn't matter." Jo put the phone on speaker and held it where Hanson could hear. "You're talking to both of us, now. What've ya got?"

"Good news first, then," Rhonda said. "Let's get it out of the way. Tommy's finally decided to talk, though he doesn't have much to say. He's sullen and distrusting of me, you, the guy running the hotdog stand, and pretty much the universe in general. In summary, I'd say he's doing remarkably well."

"That sounds like great news," Hanson replied. Instantly suspicious, he asked, "What's the catch?"

"Well, he claims he can't remember his name, where he's from, who his parents are, what he was doing in the park, or what he saw there."

"Oh, is that all?" Hanson murmured.

"Is that possible?" Jo wondered, loud enough for Rhonda to hear the question. She'd seen that kind of amnesia depicted often enough on TV shows and in the movies; in all her years of policing, she'd never seen it in reality without a substantial head injury involved—even then, she could point to only a handful of examples, and most of those weren't cases she had personally worked.

Rhonda sighed and Jo could easily imagine the grimace on her face from being asked a question that had no easy answer. There was silence, then the faint pop of Rhonda clicking her tongue. "At this stage, I'd say it doesn't matter. Whether he can't talk or whether he won't talk, the result is the same for us."

"Yeah." Jo glanced out the window, at the busses and yellow cabs that now dominated the streets and the streams of people churning down the sidewalk. So many people she'd vowed to protect and serve. She couldn't allow her efforts to be dependent on what this single child might have to say.

Immortals had a vested interest in keeping their activities away from police attention. She didn't know everything they did to keep themselves hidden, but she could guess a lot of it. Growing up in a city where mob activity was treated with a sense of awe, in both its historical and modern meanings, it was hard to not absorb the tales and myths that formed its mystique. Every New Yorker had a theory about what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, after all. She'd already noted one similarity between the mob and how the Immortals engaged with each other, and there were doubtless many others. Hell, maybe Jimmy Hoffa had been Immortal.

Drake's body hadn't been abandoned where it fell, the way the first Immortal victim she'd investigated had been. Drake's death had looked staged. It had looked, she thought, like someone wanted it to be investigated. For people who put so much effort into being unnoticed, instigating an investigation raised even more questions than any normal homicide. In the back of her mind, the idea began to niggle that this was a test. Detective Josephine Martinez knew about Immortals. Were they checking to see whose side she was on?

She squelched the thought as soon as she became aware of it. The mob was well-known for having the police in its pocket. What she was doing wasn't equivalent. She was going to do this investigation as close to procedure as she could.

Only the obvious leads had been removed. Fortunately, she had one the killer hadn't counted on. And if the kid came through, then she and Hanson had a good chance at closing this apparently unsolvable case.

And closing it was all she wanted to do. Apprehending the killer didn't matter; nothing she did would stop him. What she needed to get the mayor off the department's back and shut the media up before they discovered a pattern. The city had hundreds of reported homicides every year. She couldn't do her job for those victims and their loved ones if she had to put on a show of chasing those cases that didn't need to be solved.

 _Please let the kid get his memory back,_ she thought.

"…your job, Mike," Rhonda was saying. "While Tommy's with you, pay attention to what he talks about. Don't force him, and _don't_ try to trick him. He needs to know he can trust us."

"He's staying with you?" Jo asked, frowning. This was the first she'd heard of overnight plans.

"Reece's idea. He needs to be in protective custody when he's not with the doctors and I have boys his age at home."

"No, yeah," she answered. "That makes a lot of sense. You're all set up to take on a kid. Better you than me. I hope you can get through to him." Hanson's eyebrows waggled in a silent 'me too.' To Rhonda she asked, "Do you really think the kid has amnesia?"

Rhonda clicked her tongue again. "Ya know, ask me again tomorrow. There's something about this kid that isn't sitting right. I'm going to need some more time with him before I start making official diagnoses. In the meantime, I hope you have other leads to follow up on."

Jo was very happy to assure her that they did. She ended the call as Hanson pulled into the station lot and parked.

"Ready to start digging through the phone book?" he asked. Modern detecting was more updated than that, but the process often felt just as grinding.

It was good to have a lead in this case. A real lead. One she could trust because it came directly from the source.

For once, she could honestly answer, "Let's get to it."

Jo's enthusiasm took a hit when she got to her desk and discovered that the answer to "who in the hell names their kid Franklin Drake" was "almost no one."

She scanned the list that had been sent over with a rapidly sinking feeling in her stomach; their lead had smashed into a dead end. The list held a dozen names. Across the entire United States, there were only a dozen currently- or recently-living people with the name Jo knew belonged to their John Doe. The researcher had thoughtfully appended a separate, and much longer, list of Frank Drakes which Hanson took to winnow to a more manageable size.

Her own list had a clear divide: about half the names belonged to men over the age of 60 and the other half belonged to men younger than 35. She thought about the man she'd met in the diner and called Henry.

"Could Drake have passed for 60?" she asked.

Over the phone line, Jo heard the sound of Henry's desk chair being pushed back, then the thunk of the door to his office closing. She hadn't thought the question would need privacy to answer.

"It's extremely unlikely," Henry answered, his voice low enough that Jo knew she really had stumbled onto a sensitive topic. "Certainly not on a day-in and day-out basis. With hair dye, careful application of makeup, and the addition of glasses he might have been able to pass for 60 in short encounters." He paused again, thinking. Jo cupped her phone closer to her ear out of some misplaced instinct to keep anyone on her end from overhearing his half of the conversation. "The issue with longer encounters is not strictly gray hair and wrinkles as, in the modern world, a number of cosmetic and surgical procedures can reduce or eliminate their appearance. The issue is the bevy of other changes the human body goes through as it ages: fat distributions, epidermal thickness, bone density, and muscle strength, to name a few. The older someone claims to be, the more noticeable these changes are, especially in their absence."

Jo was nodding before he finished. "Drake looked like a healthy man in his early 40s," she stated. Undoubtedly the tailoring of his suit hid the muscles he'd have needed to have to wield the sword he'd carried. Despite that, she'd caught nothing in his posture or movements that hinted at any age beyond the one she saw.

"Precisely. Without his head to examine, I cannot make a full analysis; however, I would imagine that he had a range of roughly 15 years in which he could reasonably exist—at which point he would need to conclude his life and and start a new one."

"Fifteen years," Jo echoed. _Fifteen years_. That was how long she'd had with Sean, give or take. And then his life had ended and hers had to start over without him in it. She was the same person, only changed in every way that had mattered because of one person who had left her life. How different was it when you were the one person who had to leave? Drake had been Immortal, capable of living forever, but he could only do so in fifteen years increments. She'd never thought of immortality that way. It was like some kind of warped reincarnation, and the person she was talking to had been through it over and over for two hundred years. "Henry, how long do you get?"

She hunched deeper over the phone, cradling it, protecting it. A finger began to trace the coiled wire that connected base to handset while around her the constant roar of a working bullpen faded to nothingness. All she saw was the red light on the phone base that indicated an open line, and all she heard was the dim static of a person taking too long to answer.

"Before I have to leave? Barring any unfortunate accidents, perhaps ten more years." Henry swallowed, then added, "I will need to consider Abraham's health, as well."

Of course he would. After learning that Abe was Henry's son, she'd assumed Henry would prioritize that relationship over any new one. She _hadn't_ considered that Henry might not be able to be present for the rest of Abe's life.

Or the rest of hers.

How many nights had she lain awake after Sean died berating herself for the time they'd wasted: the trip to Rome they'd meant to take and never gotten around to; the standing Friday night dinner date that one or the other of them canceled more often than not for work; the family they'd talked about starting.

"Jo?" Henry asked.

She jumped, throwing a furtive glance around the bullpen to see if anyone had noticed her attention slip. Business chugged along, with no one the wiser as to how loudly the clock had started ticking.

"I'm here. I was just thinking." She pushed out a breath and tugged her finger out of the coil of phone wire she'd wrapped it in. "Drake's real name is a dead end. No pun intended. He must have been using a pseudonym in this life." The stolen wallet meant there was no way to know what that name was, either. Just because Richie and Liam had both kept their given first names didn't mean every Immortal did. Dammit. She thought they'd had a real lead, and it turned out the information she'd been so desperate to share was useless.

"That makes sense." A professionalism dropped over his tone that Jo recognized immediately as Henry trying not to sound disappointed. "It has become far more difficult to maintain one's name than it used to be, especially when that name is unusual. I need to be returning to work. Is there anything else I can assist you with?"

"There is one more thing I'd like to know." Another breath out that riffled the corners of the sheets of Franklin Drakes. "Is your offer still open? Two weeks living with you sounds like an excellent idea."


	9. Thursday - Jo & Henry, Jo & Hanson

Thursday morning, Jo arrived at Henry's place with a suitcase in one hand and a paper bag of bagels and schmear from her favorite deli in the other. She didn't know the etiquette for moving in with someone for a short time, and that only added to the nervousness that had crept up on her over the last couple days. The sidewalk was empty this time of morning, most of the surrounding stores still hours away from opening. Though the streetlights had shut off well-before, the air still held the flavor of dawn along with the beginnings of a humidity that would soon turn hot and sticky. Her blouse was already beginning to cling to her sides.

This was really happening. She was really about to push her relationship with Henry to a place they couldn't come back from. After so long together at a level that was just barely more than platonic, it was…quite frankly…terrifying. In so many ways, she and Henry barely knew each other. While she'd enjoyed a few one night stands in her life—and suffered through a few others—this wasn't comparable. They weren't strangers, either. This move-in was a trial that could easily turn into more.

 _It's not too late to walk away,_ she told herself. Henry would be hurt, but he'd understand. Work would become awkward. Leaving now would be tantamount to a breakup, and she didn't want that either.

The door opened on her dithering to reveal Abe lugging a heavy suitcase of his own.

"Jo!" he exclaimed, far more animatedly that anyone had a right to sound this early. "Henry didn't tell me you were coming by to see me off." His eyes narrowed in mock suspicion. "Or are you here to make sure I really leave? Henry's still upstairs, you know. Preening. I swear he's trying on every scarf he owns. I could sneak back up and he'd never notice."

Jo's lips twitched into a smile. The idea of Henry failing to notice something so major as Abe not leaving on his trip because he was too busy with his clothes was just absurd enough to be funny, while also holding enough truth to be possible.

"I brought breakfast," Jo answered, holding the bag of bagels out. After the amount of thought she'd put into whether wine, flowers, or food was the better gift, bagels suddenly seemed pathetic. She hadn't even brought coffee to wash them down with. Some houseguest she was turning out to be. "It's not much. I just thought there might be a lot going on this morning…"

Abe slapped a hand over his head. "A woman who speaks my language. I knew there was a reason I liked you. Here I thought I was going to have to wait until I cleared security to get anything to eat. Did you know airplanes charge extra for food, these days? It's a ripoff, is what it is." He accepted the bag, dropped his gaze the rest of the way to her luggage, then took in his own, which blocked the doorway. "How about I trade bags with you? My cab should be here any minute. You wait down here for it, and I'll run your bag and the food upstairs." Dropping his voice to a stage whisper, he added, "I'll even let Pops know you're here."

The offer was a relief. She was a grown woman and Henry was very much a grown man, yet she hadn't been able to shake the sense that they were sneaking around. "Thanks, Abe. That'd be great."

A little jockeying, and they got the suitcases switched around. Jo pulled Abe's suitcase out to the curb and sat down on it, both to protect the item and because she had no idea how long the wait might be. She hoped it would be soon. The day's heat was already settling in. Jo plucked at her blouse and silently cursed the department dress code that required her to wear long pants.

"He'll be down, soon," Abe said, appearing next to her. The strap of the brown satchel he'd slung over his shoulder wrinkled his shirt. Unlike Henry, he didn't seem to care. He handed her half a toasted and smeared bagel and took a bite out of the other half.

Jo stood up automatically and gestured for Abe to take her place on the impromptu seat.

"I got plenty of sitting ahead of me on the flight down to Miami." He wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead. "Feels like a good week to be getting out of the city. Some ocean breeze is just what these old bones need. Margaritas, fresh fruit that hasn't been sitting on a truck for three days, some beautiful, and very lonely, single women…"

It was filler talk, words for the sake of not sitting in silence. Jo inserted the appropriate nods and moues to tell him she was listening while she kept an eye on the steadily increasing traffic in search of Abe's cab.

"I'm glad you agreed to this," he said suddenly.

Jo's head jerked up in surprise. "You are? You don't think this is—" She waved a hand toward the apartment window—"weird?"

"You live with Henry long enough and you learn to accept a certain amount of weird. Weird is his normal." He chewed a bite of bagel thoughtfully, then added, "You two, you don't qualify as weird. You're good. Henry needs someone like you around to keep him stabilized."

She thought about how Henry had been when they'd first met: he'd been so arrogant about his own knowledge, as if he assumed everyone was eager for his insight. The observations he'd shared about her and anyone, dead or alive, who crossed his path that showed no regard for how human beings interacted with each other were simply creepy. All of that had toned down over that first year together. It hadn't gone away. It wouldn't. Henry's quirks were too ingrained, were too much a part of who he was. But it had definitely become more acceptable. Was that all because of her?

"He has you," she pointed out. And now Richie and Liam, though maybe they didn't count because they were also immortal.

Abe gave a thin smile and peered off down the street, though he wasn't looking at the cars. "Henry's good at a lot of things—I suppose living so long means there's plenty of time to practice—but thinking about the future ain't one of 'em. He needs some help planning ahead."

"Wait, are you saying that having me move in was your idea?" Jo gave a reflexive shudder at the idea of Abe playing matchmaker like that.

Patting her shoulder, Abe said, "Oh, I assure you, it was entirely his idea. All I did was keep him from talking himself out of it." Like she had almost done. Both of them were turning out to be a lot more gun shy than they'd been able to admit. "Henry _says_ he doesn't want to rush into another serious relationship. Me, I think you'll make a great step-mom."

For a second, Jo sat in stunned silence. Step-mom? She was still trying to get used to the word 'girlfriend.' From anyone else, she might have taken offense at getting married off before she was ready. But Abe was standing against the streetlamp, innocently eating his bagel. She threw her head back and laughed. Abe's touch settled on her shoulder again, and Jo caught his hand and gave it a light squeeze.

The conversation switched back to banalities then, and not a moment too soon as Henry finally emerged to join them, having apparently decided that none of his scarves were fit for the occasion. He passed out mugs of coffee, which everyone gratefully took to wash down the bagels, greeted Jo with a kiss and Abe with a hug, and then demanded that Abe give him yet another run-down of his itinerary for the trip.

By the time the cab pulled up, Abe had run through the order of ports of call enough that Jo had them memorized.

"If there are any problems, I'll call," Abe said. "Ships have these things called telephones nowadays. They also have wi-fi." He looked meaningfully at Jo. " _She_ knows how to check her texts. I'll text her, if I have to."

Henry's eyes flashed and his shoulders puffed up. "The transition of 'text' to a verb is an appalling example of—" Maybe only some of Henry's quirks had mellowed.

"Let me help you get your suitcase loaded," Jo said, reaching for the handle at the same time as Abe. It ended up taking the two of them to wrestle the suitcase into the cab's trunk.

Huffing from exertion, Abe came in for a goodbye hug. "Let's not tell him what happened to the word 'party,'" he whispered into Jo's ear. Louder, he continued, "I'll be back in two weeks. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

"I assure you, I have no intention of doing anything you wouldn't do," Henry replied dryly, "nor do I want to contemplate where that boundary might lay." A few more requests for Abe to be safe and to return with stories he could tell his father, and Henry finally allowed Abe to climb into the waiting cab.

As the cab pulled away from the curb, he rolled the window down and stuck his arm out, hand fisted and thumb up.

"He seems pretty pleased with this," Jo commented. It was still hard to believe.

Henry waved one final time. The stiffness in his posture gave away his pain at having to say goodbye. He'd told her that no matter how many times he'd sent Abraham off—whether to school, to the military, or to his own life—a part of him worried that this goodbye could be the last one. Now that Abraham was an old man, that worry was all the heavier. Abe thought Henry didn't look to the future, but Jo was beginning to suspect that that was because Henry already knew what he was going to find there.

"He likes you," Henry said. He smiled ruefully. "And he seems to think you're good for me."

Hearing Abe's assessment come out of Henry's mouth only reinforced how important Abe's opinion was to Henry. "Then let's go find out if he's right," Jo answered. "We have some time before we have to get in to work. Why don't you help me unpack?"

"You only brought a suitcase. I can't imagine you'll need much help—"

"Henry." Jo tucked her arm around his waist and pulled him close. "You're missing the point. We're going to be spending the next two weeks living together. Don't you think we should establish some ground rules for how to make this work?" A tug and she began leading him toward the apartment door. "For starters, did you at least remember to clear out a drawer for me?" She smiled up at him; this wasn't the point she had meant to start with, but it was both concrete and relatively minor, which made it a good ice-breaker.

"Ground rules, yes." Henry cleared his throat. "It is always a challenge when two people with set routines try to merge their lives. Preemptively resolving potential areas of miscommunication can only be to our benefit."

Jo shook her head slightly to herself. Henry sounded nervous enough that one might think he'd never lived with a romantic interest before. Not that it was any easier for her. She'd been so young when she married Sean. Both of them were just starting out. Finding an apartment, picking out furniture, decorating—everything that went into the mechanics of living with someone involved decisions they made together. Now, here she was, moving into someone else's established space in one swoop. _Nothing like jumping right in,_ she told herself. _Get the shock over with so you can get on with the good part._

The door stymied Henry. He opened it, then stood there, looking like he couldn't decide whether to walk through or step out of the way. "Should I, ah, carry you over the threshold?"

"I think we need to be married first," Jo answered with a small laugh. "Besides, there's nothing wrong with my legs."

"No, of course not. I didn't mean to imply…"

"Henry, it's OK. There's no script to follow here. We're just going to have to make it up as we go along." She nudged him aside and stepped into the stairwell that led to Henry and Abe's upstairs apartment. The scent of garlic from Abe's previous night's dinner wafted down over her and she inhaled deeply. She'd been in this stairwell so many times, usually passing through it with no more attention than she'd give to any other stairwell; it was simply a means of access. Today the narrow confines, painted in Basic White and showing none of the decorative flare the rest of the living quarters had, felt higher and wider, like it was expanding to make room for her.

Henry was still hovering in the doorway, his eyes widened and glistening with fear. He was dressed for work in his usual black trousers, a white shirt, and a vest with an argyle pattern on it—and he looked distinctly uncomfortable.

Jo stopped on the base of the stairs, a safe distance in. "You're not having second thoughts, are you?" The next part was harder to say, but she had to. "It's OK if you are. I can run up and grab my suitcase—"

"No!" Henry stepped into the stairwell and pulled the door shut behind him. Jo's eyes took a moment to adjust to the sudden loss of sunlight, so she felt rather than saw Henry's approach. "I was afraid you would. This is a big step for both of us."

"Yeah, it is," she agreed. She'd been shocked when he asked and she'd dragged her feet on giving him an answer, but once she had, she'd seen the inevitability of this move. "But I think it's time to take it. We've been through a lot together, more than most normal couples go through in… _ever_. Face it, most normal couples don't solve crimes together or routinely have conversations about methods and manners of death or…." Jo had ascended a step while she'd been talking and now Henry stood alone at the bottom of the stairs. On level ground, they were well-matched for height. She'd never stood over him like this. Leaning over, she caught his face in her hands, the stubble of his whiskers rough against her palms, and kissed him. Against his mouth, she added, "Or anything. I'm tired of waiting."

There was nothing like saying it to make it real. Suddenly, Jo was very tired of waiting. A year of dancing around each other and now they were finally in a place where they could act.

Unfortunately, they had to go to work, so this kiss couldn't be more than a promise—but, oh what a promise. They had the whole weekend in front of them: No work, no appointments, no breakfast dates.

Jo pulled back with the taste of Henry on her lips. He looked momentarily dazed, but recovered with a rapid shake of his head.

"I spent yesterday evening reorganizing my bureau and medicine cabinet," he said, indicating for her to continue up the stairs. "There should be ample room for the belongings you brought along. Naturally, you're welcome to help yourself to anything that is already here, should you have need."

They reached the top and continued into the apartment. The knick-knacks on display near the door glistened from freshly applied wood polish and the rug was still lined with vacuum cleaner streaks. Henry had been busy.

"As you're already familiar with the layout of the apartment, I won't offer a tour. However, if you'll follow me, I'll show you what you can do with your clothes." Henry gave Jo a once over that left no doubt about what he wanted to do with her clothes.

Heat rose in her face, but Jo couldn't help smiling. They really had waited too long. And as soon as they got back from work, they could start making up for lost time.

* * *

Hanson was already at work when Jo arrived, a bounce in her step that hadn't been there in a long time. He was bent over his desk with a pen in one hand and his stress ball squeezed tight in the other.

"What've you got?" she asked, rolling her chair over to join him. The top page of his stack of paper looked like a list, though she couldn't make out what of from her angle. Several of the entries were already crossed out with thick lines, which a few others had check marks next to them.

"Too many kids," Hanson grumbled, looking at her. His eyes were bloodshot, dark bags underneath announcing both a late night and an early morning. "Ya know, Karen wanted to have a third. I told her no. No way we could raise three kids on our salaries in this city. Now we got a third, and I'm realizing it's not our salaries that are the problem. You ever try to add a third boy to a room when the other two don't want him?"

She never had, though a memory or two of her brothers fighting over their shared space sprang to mind. Neither of the boys believed in pulling their punches, which meant that disagreements about who was overstepping his bounds led more than once to black eyes, broken noses, and—on one memorable occasion—a dislocated shoulder. Hanson's boys might be younger and smaller, but she knew they were more than capable of tearing each other apart. "They didn't get too rough on him, did they? He needs a space place to heal if he's going to be any good to us." She stopped. It sounded so crass put like that, as if the boy's mental health only mattered as long as it could be of use to her. "Sorry. What I mean is—"

"Yeah, I know what you mean." Hanson gave her foot a friendly nudge. "And, no, they weren't rough on him at all. Wouldn't have anything to do with him, in fact. Said he was 'creepy.'" He hitched one shoulder in a shrug. "You know how kids are. Here: take these." Grabbing a folder from his inbox, he shoved it at her, then fished out a new pen for her to use.

"So what's with the raccoon eyes?" she asked. "Don't tell me you were up all night worrying about him?"

Hanson's eyebrows shot up, as if he'd never considered such an idea. "Me? Hell, no. The kid's had a tough run. Straightening him out is what the shrinks are for and getting him a better life after this is what CFS is for. I'll let them do all the worrying about him. Now my own boys…" He let out a deep, weary sigh. "They refused to sleep in their room. Insisted on bunking with us. I told Karen we should've gotten a King-sized bed."

The image of the four Hansons trying to share a bed, a Queen-sized bed at that, brought an unintentional smile to Jo's lips. No wonder Mike looked so exhausted. "I take it that didn't go so well?" She shouldn't be laughing at his rough night, only it was so hard to take the situation seriously.

"Tell you what: when you and Henry get around to having kids of your own, you get back to me about how much room kids take up. They only look small. As soon as their heads hit the pillow, it's limbs everywhere."

His bringing up Henry dampened Jo's good mood. Kids had been one of Sean's goals, and one she'd been willing to go along with if it happened. It hadn't happened, and now she was getting old enough that she wasn't all that interested. "That's not really on the radar," Jo replied, noncommittally. She and Henry both had a lot of things to figure out first, the most important of which were none of Hanson's business. Hoping to get her partner off the topic before he could pry any of those issues out of her, she tapped a finger on his list. "What's this?"

Hanson pushed his chair back and stretched with the loud cracking of several vertebrae. His tie lay askew across his chest and had a clear egg stain on it. "This is a list of hotels, motels, and beds and breakfasts within a mile of the park. Yours is the list of Frank Drakes in this country who are white males in the 35-50 range. I checked with Morgan on that. Do you ever get the feeling there's a joke he's not letting you in on?" His face scrunched up like he could almost see the insight he sought. Jo elected to treat his question as rhetorical. When Hanson didn't get either a response or an argument, he turned back to the papers and explained, "Since we can't get an ID through the usual channels, we're going to have to do the grunt work in trying to track this guy down."

Drake wasn't on her list. Jo already knew that. But, she was still going to have to put in at least several hours of work to verify that detail for everyone else's satisfaction. She leafed idly through the pages in her folder without seeing any of what they said just to keep from looking at Hanson. "Why a mile?" she asked, instead.

"So, hear me out," Hanson replied. "The guy had on dress shoes, right? Nice leather things that were freshly polished. He didn't walk far in those. I'm betting he was an out-of-towner who was staying in hotel near the park. Walked over for some peace-and-quiet, a little communion with nature, and met his end."

"A mile seems really far." Jo closed her eyes and tried to imagine where the restaurant was in proximity to the park. Drake had said he was only stopping in for lunch, which implied that wherever he was staying was somewhere nearby. Maybe instead of telling what she knew or how she knew it, she could point the official search in the right direction through more subtle means. Triangulating from the restaurant to the park narrowed the range of inquiry to one that was almost laughably manageable.

"That's why the list is organized from nearest to farthest," Hanson was saying. "I'm going to work my way out. See if anyone checked in who didn't check out when they were supposed to. I guess we're both winning sensitivity awards today, aren't we, 'cause our guy definitely 'checked out.'" He rolled his neck again. "I'm gonna get a refill," he said, standing up and grabbing his coffee mug. "You want one?"

"Sure," Jo answered. She'd already had a couple cups with Henry while they getting her settled in the apartment. A day full of desk work practically begged for an excuse to get up and use the bathroom frequently. "Try not to put too much sugar in it."

Hanson grinned, saluting her with his cup. "I'll bring you a donut, then. Lieu brought in a whole box right before you got here. There's gotta be a crumb or two left. Can't have you pouring the department's swill onto an empty stomach."

"What makes you think I—" _haven't eaten_ , Jo almost asked. No, she didn't want the answer to that one. She'd had half a bagel. The department's coffee needed more cushioning than that. "Never mind. I'll get started on my list. If I find anything, I'll let you know." While Hanson went in pursuit of his coffee, she rolled back to her own desk. She had to at least look like she was giving the list a valiant effort before dismissing it.

A cup appeared in front of her, the liquid still sloshing from its travels. Hanson's chair rolled up next to hers a moment later and a napkin-wrapped donut was thrust at her. "So," Hanson said, in a tone that was so nonchalant that Jo knew it was a trap, "What do you think about putting parenting on your radar?"

She stared at him in confusion for a moment until the pleading expression and the direction of the question sunk in, and then all she could manage was, "Excuse me?"

"Come on, Jo," Hanson wheedled. "Do me a favor and take Tommy off my hands. You have the space; you're in tighter with his shrink than I am; and I can guarantee that taking care of one kid is a helluva lot easier than taking care of three."

All good arguments, to be sure, but her life wasn't in the same place this week as it was last week. She wasn't going back to her place tonight. While, granted, Henry's apartment also had plenty of room, the loss of privacy from Tommy's presence would be devastating. Her and Henry's first night together would end up being no different than if she hadn't moved in at all.

"No," she stated. "I don't know anything about kids. I haven't spent more than a couple hours at a time around kids I'm not related to since I _was_ a kid." It wasn't her best argument—she'd think of that one as soon as the case was over and the argument didn't matter anymore,—but her real reason sounded so much weaker when she tried to hear it from an outsider's perspective.

She ended up repeating the same argument to Reece a few minutes later to even less sympathy.

"I'm sorry." Reece folded her hands together and sat back in her chair with an air of finality. "While I appreciate the imposition taking the witness will cause on your personal life, I'm afraid I'm going to have to make this an order. I spoke to Karen and she cited real concerns about the welfare of her own children. As they are children, and as such are not legally able to agree to participate in a case, their needs need to take precedence."

Jo hung her head. She'd explained about moving in with Henry, only to discover that Reece viewed that as an asset. No one officially wanted to broach the idea that Tommy was unstable, but no one was willing to dismiss it either. He was a street kid, either a runaway or an orphan, suffering from recent mental trauma. His witness status aside, those reasons alone would have kept him out of immediate foster placement. The presence of two adults was simply safer for everyone. That Henry was a doctor was an added benefit.

"There's gotta be a uniform we can put on this," Jo said, going for one last try. "Someone who's trained to work with kids."

Reece smiled apologetically. "There probably is, and if this were any other case I'd go find that person for you. As it is, the fewer people who are tied to this case, the less likely it is that the media will get wind of it. Dr. Morgan is already familiar with the details. Between the two of you, you should be able to manage one ten year old for the weekend. With any luck, he'll blossom under your hospitality and, by Monday, we can close this case."

Monday. The whole weekend gone before it had started.

Standing up, Jo went to call Henry to give him the bad news first.


	10. Thursday - Richie & Methos

When Mac gave Richie his first sword, he told him to keep it with him and make it part of him because it might sometimes be his only friend. Though he didn't really understand the advice, Richie had done his best to take it to heart. He'd quickly found that carrying a sword around with him all the time was a lot more difficult than Mac had made it look. Successfully concealing three feet of steel inside a coat took constant attention to how you stood, how you swung your arms, and how you walked. He'd had to relearn how to run, and learn entirely how not to slice himself or his clothing open on his own blade. Years later, he'd tried to put his sword down for good and discovered that he'd grown so used to its weight in his coat or the touch of its scabbard against his leg when he was riding that not having the blade in reach _was_ like missing a friend.

After he rolled out of bed Thursday morning, he swapped out his pajamas for a pair of shorts and a shirt to run in, then caught himself reaching for his sword. He always kept it next to his bed while he slept. On the days he went running, he strapped the sword to his bike so he could get to it if necessary. Not being armed if a Challenge was issued was the same thing as forfeiting.

Richie's hand closed on empty space and a flash of panic flared in him before his still-awakening brain remembered that he'd stuck the sword into a storage box under the bed with his winter coat for the duration of Emily's stay. He wasn't ready for her to see it, wasn't ready for the questions she'd invariably ask about it. That meant he had to learn to live without it again. To have a girlfriend, he was going to have to give up his best friend. Grabbing only his shoes, he went out to the main room.

To his surprise, Methos was already up, seated in his usual place on the sofa, headphones on and laptop open. He had on a shirt. A real shirt, faded red with a pocket on its chest, and what looked like khaki shorts. So, Richie wasn't the only one adjusting some habits in preparation for their house guest.

Richie glanced at the clock over the microwave then raised an eyebrow at his roommate. "What are you doing awake? I thought you had some kind of ethical objection to dawn?" Crossing to the fridge, he retrieved an apple, then went back to the sofa to eat it while he put his shoes on.

Methos tugged the headphones off and let them drop around his neck, but didn't take his eyes off the laptop screen. "I'm on Paris time." Every few seconds he pressed a key, frowning each time at the results. "I've been checking in with some old contacts."

"About what?"

"What do you think?"

Richie thought he was supposed to know this, except part of the reason he went running in the early mornings was because it didn't require any brain power, as evidenced by the fact that he had an apple in one hand and a pair of running shoes in the other and he'd nearly taken a bite out of the running shoes. "Just tell me. I have a lot to do to get ready and I'm not in the mood for your riddles."

"Asking questions instead of providing easy answers is an established teaching technique," Methos countered. He hit the key harder this time, as if the machine would respond to his impatience. "When students have to work through a problem on their own—"

"The Watchers!" Richie exclaimed, to Methos' evident surprise.

The symbol on the screen had given it away. Craning his head, Richie got a glimpse at the rest of the screen. From his angle, he couldn't read the words, but he could see the picture of Franklin Drake. He felt his fingernails bite through the skin of the apple. "You're reading the Watcher files." That was a step he hadn't thought about. He'd only had contact with his own Watcher once, and he didn't like to push his luck with Joe. Better to save that resource for when he really needed it, like when he got killed in a building explosion and needed a safe place to sleep while he got his feet back under him.

"They don't know it's me, of course. Adam Pierson has been dead to them for awhile so I'm using a newer ghost to poke around. I've found that it pays to keep some spare identities active."

The idea of the Watchers, with all their closely guarded secrets and layers of security, being tricked _again_ into giving up information to an Immortal was enough to make Richie want to call Joe just to gloat. He wouldn't, but he wanted to.

Methos unfolded from the couch and carried the laptop over to the counter where the coffee pot sat, still periodically hitting the key. Richie now saw that he was refreshing the screen, though nothing on it appeared to be changing. "I wanted to find out more about Drake, see if there was anything enlightening in his file."

He'd said as much when they first talked about Drake's death, which had been almost two days ago. "It took you this long to get into the Watcher records?" Richie asked. He was missing something. "I'd've thought that'd be the first stop. I mean, the Watchers keep records on us; you used to be a Watcher; aren't you, like, _used_ to heading straight for the reports or whatever it is they have on file for us?" He frowned as another question occurred to him. "That info _is_ secure, right? It's not just out there on the Internet for everyone to access?" He knew it couldn't be, but with all the data breaches he'd heard about recently, maybe he shouldn't assume the Watchers had their files locked down as tight as he believed.

Methos shot him an unamused glare. "Certain procedures still have to be observed," he stated, as if Richie should know what those procedures were and how complicated their observance was. "And, yes, it's secure. We've already seen the consequences of the database getting into the wrong hands once. It will _not_ happen again."

That was a good a guarantee as Richie had ever heard. Methos had left the organization, but he was never going to leave it unmonitored, as he'd already made clear. When it came to the question of who watches the Watchers, the answer appeared to be Methos all the way down. It clicked then: the outfit, the need for Methos to be on Paris time.

"You didn't sneak into the files; you asked to be let in. What the hell, man? What kind of contacts do you have?" It wasn't Joe, not in the least because Joe was on the West Coast and definitely wouldn't be awake right now. That meant it had to be someone Methos knew from when he was in the Watchers, except that had been twenty years before. If he'd Skyped someone, they'd certainly have noticed that he hadn't aged in that time. "Does someone there know who you are?"

In answer, Richie got only a thin lipped smile that neither confirmed nor denied anything, and that managed to leave Richie with the impression that he was both a colossal idiot and the wisest man in the world. Screw sword fighting; that's what he needed Methos to teach him to do. Recognizing that he wasn't going to get a clearer answer, Richie bit into the apple and chewed. "Yeah, OK. So, what did you find about Drake?"

Methos refreshed the screen again and whispered an impatient "Come on," before dumping the laptop on the counter and turning to more immediate tasks. He filled the bean grinder and switched it on. Its noise consumed the small apartment for a few seconds and left a void when it ended. Into the fresh silence, he said, "His file is pretty thin. He was young, not much more than a century, and not all that interested in the Game. He only took five heads in his life, and none in the last thirty years."

"A century? That's not all _that_ young," Richie protested, though given whom he was talking to, anyone born _anno dominie_ would count as young. By Methos' standards, Richie was hardly out of diapers.

As if Richie hadn't spoken, Methos continued, "He'd been a businessman his whole life. Bit of a golden boy, too. Had a real knack for picking the right interests to invest in, until suddenly he didn't. Black Tuesday wiped out his accounts, so he stuck a gun in his mouth."

"First death?" Richie confirmed, shuddering in sympathy. First deaths were always a surprise, but that one had to have been especially shocking—and not in a good way. Finding out that you couldn't die when you thought you had nothing left to live for was a hell of way to get started.

"His teacher was a woman named Zyanya." Methos' brow creased in consideration. "Appropriate. I wonder if her people knew." A shake of his head, and he brought himself back on track while he moved through the motions of emptying the carafe and refilling the water tank. "She lost her head in the 50s, so she wasn't the one who killed him. All his own fights appeared to be routine. He preferred to disengage when he had the choice. I couldn't find any indication of an enemy. No one with a grudge."

The apple had lost its taste, but Richie forced himself to keep eating it. Drake had been a lot like him: a guy who just wanted to get through life without killing anyone. So Richie had taken a few more heads. A guy had to do what he had to do to survive, and sometimes that meant taking the wrong road before figuring out the right one. He was starting to wonder if coming to New York City hadn't been entirely the wrong road. If being in the City for a few days had gotten Drake killed, what chance did Richie have when he _did_ have enemies? The way everyone seemed to flock to the place, it was no wonder Connor had been so adamant about not letting them play.

"Just tell me he was killed by one of us," Richie said. It was a lot more comforting to think that Drake had chosen to give up his head rather than have it taken by someone who couldn't take his Quickening. Death was one thing; annihilation another thing entirely.

"There's no way to know until the terminal report comes through." Methos hit refresh again. "That's what I'm waiting for. It usually takes a day or two for a file to update; I was told the update should be coming through any minute." He lapsed into silence while he alternated checking the laptop and the level of the freshly brewing coffee. It was anybody's guess which one he wanted to have finish first.

Sighing to himself, Richie bent over to get his shoes on. He was sitting close enough to the living room window to feel the early warmth of the day trying to push through the wall. If he didn't get moving soon, he was going to die from heatstroke. 

Funny how that wasn't a metaphor. He was going to have to be careful what he said around Emily, even as a joke.

Her rapidly approaching arrival was making him more sensitive to the ways in which his life wasn't like a mortal's; he knew that. It happened every time he started to get serious with someone, and was almost always the reason he ended the relationship. The constant need to be on guard for slips of the tongue about his past, injuries whose absence couldn't be explained, and people coming out of the woodwork who wanted to kill him was…well, like learning to carry a sword. It was difficult and exhausting, and it became very easy to grow resentful of the reason he had to behave so unnaturally. Emily would be the only person he was in close contact with who didn't know what he was or how different his life was.

If he and Methos didn't figure out what happened to Drake soon, they wouldn't be able to discuss it again until after Emily left. That was enough to make him consider, once again, calling her to cancel. _Face it, Ryan,_ he told himself, _unless you want to start dating Immortals again, you're always going to have this part. Might as well learn to deal with it._

He was just standing up, somewhat chastened, when Methos barked out an "ah-ha" that made Richie snap the core of his apple in half.

Methos stabbed a finger on the touchscreen and scanned the information that popped up. His expression gave away nothing, though the hiss and drip of the coffee maker seemed to grow both louder and more insistent.

"What?" Richie demanded.

"Look who's up to his old tricks." Methos turn the laptop around, balancing it on his arm, and adjusted the screen so Richie could see it. 

The image that stared out at him was one he thought he'd never seen again, speaking of having enemies out there. "Fuuuuck." Richie stepped closer, half-hoping that he hadn't really recognized the killer. Though his angle cast a slight glare on the screen, his eyes had not deceived him. With one detail, Drake's death made perfect sense. It wasn't a Watcher or a Hunter or any mortal interfering in a Game he shouldn't be playing; it was only a case of one Immortal who made the mistake of trusting another one he shouldn't have. "He's in town? He's still _alive_?"

Richie dragged his hand down the back of his head, letting out a snort of frustration. This was his luck. This was always his luck. Just when he thought things were going pretty well, an upset always came along: someone framing him for a crime he didn't commit, dying in front of thousands of witnesses, his dearest friend getting possessed and trying to take his head, and on and on it went.

"I'm gonna have to cancel," he said. "It's not safe for Emily to be here."

Methos gave a slight shrug and set the computer back on the counter so they both could see it. "For what it's worth, there's no guarantee he's still in town." He stopped, considered, then added, "Or that he's still alive. He got his kill, so he's probably moved on, searching for his next victim. Unless someone else got to him first. Drake's Watcher left town himself right after the Quickening. I suspect he's now sitting on a beach in Florida enjoying some mandatory vacation time while he waits to get reassigned." He gazed for a moment at the ceiling, as if picturing himself on a beach in Florida with a beer in hand and waves lapping at his feet. If Methos was buying the plane tickets, Richie would happily join him. Getting out of town seemed like a great idea right now.

"Why not check with his Watcher?" Richie asked. It seemed like a question he shouldn't have to ask, which immediately made him suspicious. Joe had ingrained in Richie that the Watcher database wasn't to be used to hunting purposes, and Methos treated that as an inviolate rule, but knowing if someone was in a city the size of New York City was hardly the same as knowing his address.

Turning away, Methos poured himself a cup of coffee and indulged in a long draw before answering, "He doesn't have one. The Watchers have learned that it's better to leave some of us alone."

That just figured. "You know what," Richie said, "I'm not gonna ask. I get spied on and followed around for…whatever reason the Watchers are interested in me. Because I'm one of the youngest players in the Game or MacLeod's latest student, who knows? _Liam_ has a Watcher, and he doesn't do anything except run youth groups and bless people's newborns. That must be a fun Chronicle to read. Meanwhile, you're a walking legend in I-don't-even-know how many ways and rather than record your life, they _let_ you have access to everyone else's. And that little bastard—" He pitched the now-browned pieces of apple violently into the sink. They hit the metal with satisfying splats. "I'm going for my run now. When I get back, I'm taking a load down to the laundromat. If you have anything you want to throw in, have it ready."

"Wait." Methos reached into the cabinet over the fridge and pulled out a Bowie knife that reminded Richie of Crocodile Dundee's, "This is a knife." "Do me a favor and take this."

Richie blinked at it in disbelief. What the hell had it been doing up there? Methos had promised that all the weapons were secured where Emily couldn't find them. Then again, if she wasn't coming, then it didn't matter where the weapons were.

Still. "I'm not going jogging with _that_ ," Richie stated, a bit more loudly than he meant to.

"Would you rather have a gun? Because I'm not letting you out of here unless you're armed."

It was tempting. Having some kind of weapon on him would be safer. Or he could go back and get his sword. His eyes slid toward his room, but his feet didn't follow. As much as he knew the potential danger, the idea of going weaponless held a different kind of thrill. A headhunter in town wasn't the same as a headhunter specifically targeting him. He'd encountered both often enough to know the difference.

"Ya know, Mac used to go off sometimes without his sword to remind himself that we were more than killers." _Say it a few more times and you might start to believe it's possible,_ he thought. "I think I could stand a refresher or two on that." Drawing a deep breath of the now coffee-scented air, he added pragmatically, "Besides, I'll already be running. If I have to, I'll hoof it to the nearest Holy Ground."

"Sounds like you have this all figured out." Methos cast his gaze downward while he took another draw of his coffee. "So, we will be having a houseguest this weekend?"

Richie shot him a questioning look. "I swear I said I was going to cancel. The tickets will scalp and I can pay Emily back for the bus. She probably won't speak to me again, but..." His face contorted as recollections of past fights with other girls he'd tried to date flooded through his mind. No matter how into him a girl was, she was only willing to accept "I can't tell you" as the explanation for his actions once or twice before it became a deal-breaker. "I'll live."

"What are you going to live for?" Methos asked, yet again. He'd been bringing up that question a lot since his arrival, and it still never failed to take Richie by surprise. "Seems to me that if you're not worried about your safety, then there's no threat. If there's no threat, then there's no need to change your plans."

What had seemed like a perfectly ordinary conversation that Richie was on top of turned out to be the opposite. Richie wished he had something else to throw because the man was right. "Dammit, Methos. I hate it when you do that."

"Then I suggest you stop making it so easy. Also, it's Matt. Wouldn't want you to slip up with my name in front of your girlfriend. Or your Watcher."

Grumbling, Richie headed off for his run. He had a lot to do to get ready for the weekend, and now that he knew there was no mystery to Drake's death, it all seemed much more important.


	11. Friday - Jo, Henry, and Tommy

"This is where you'll be staying," Henry stated, as he ushered Tommy through the door. "Detective Martinez and I are in the master bedroom. You can stay in Abraham's room. We'll change the linens before you head off to bed. Abraham tends to run cold at night—it's his age, I presume. The elderly do seem to lose their tolerance for the cold—so there are ample blankets on the bed. I'm certain there's a small lamp around here somewhere we can press into service as a night light…" With that goal, he began searching among the accumulated antiques that filled the apartment, muttering to himself as he looked.

"Abraham?" Tommy asked, turning big, helpless eyes to Jo. "Who's that? I thought you said no one else was here? I'm not going to be in the way, am I?"

Shutting the door, Jo carried the paper bag that contained Tommy's meager belongings over to the coffee table, which happened to be the nearest flat and mostly-empty surface. The corner ripped as she set it down, and the handle of Tommy's toothbrush jutted out. The green lumps of a plastic ninja turtle face stared up at her. Tommy was going to be in the way, but she could never tell him that; he was just a kid--and one who didn't have anywhere else to go. 

"Abe is Henry's roommate," she explained. She couldn't quite manage to look Tommy in the eyes as she explained. She freed the toothbrush from its rip and twirled it idly between her fingers. "He's on vacation and won't be back for a couple weeks, so his room's all yours. We should have everything figured out before he gets back, so we'll be able to find some place for you to go permanently then. Which turtle is your favorite?" As an attempt to change the topic, she thought it was a pretty good one. She'd watched the _Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles_ growing up and, while it had been a few years, she thought she could still hold her own in a discussion. Anything to connect to the kid would be useful in getting him to open up, which would help the police close the case. She held the toothbrush out for Tommy to take.

The helpless look blanked, and Tommy turned away as if she hadn't spoken, leaving her still grasping the molded plastic. "There's a lot of really old stuff in here," he commented. "I guess you guys didn't expect to have me around. People usually hide their good stuff when they think there's going to be a kid near it." He drifted toward a cabinet pressed up against one wall, his hand already out to touch whatever caught his eye—which happened to be a selection of animal figurines that looked to be carved out of bone or ivory. "You musta done something pretty bad to get stuck with me."

"Bad? Why would you think that? Your being here isn't a punishment." She had to remember that. Reece hadn't put Tommy in her care because of any decision Jo had made, no matter how closely the two event were linked. "You're here so we can keep you safe."

"So that's why you didn't put any of the expensive things away?" Tommy shook his head as if he'd expected better of them. "Where'd he get these from, anyway? They look neat." He reached for one of the figurines, and it was all Jo could do to not dive across the room to catch anything he might accidentally knock from the surface. What Jo knew about antiques could fit on a Post-It note, but breakable was breakable, no matter how old it was. 

"Uh, Abe is an antique dealer. Henry helps him run the shop. Be careful," she warned, taking a jerking step toward him despite herself. "I don't think those are meant to be handled." 

Tommy swiveled his head around as if to see who she was talking to, then ostentatiously stuck his hands in his pockets, just as Henry spoke.

"Ah, here we go." Henry reached for a small lamp on the top of a bookshelf and lifted it down. Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he began rubbing smudges only he could see off the colored glass pieces that made up the shade. He stopped to dampen the corner of the handkerchief with his tongue. Only then did he notice where Tommy was. He made a small squeaking noise and started forward, less able to resist his urges than Jo had been. "Those aren't for touching. They're very fragile." The cord of the lamp, still plugged into the wall, yanked him to a stop.

Jo got a good look at what he was holding—and that was it; that's what she knew about antiques. "Uh, Henry," she started, a wild gesture at the lamp. She was suddenly less concerned about Tommy carelessly breaking anything than she was about Henry doing so. "Maybe the Tiffany lamp isn't a good idea. We can pick up a light from the Walgreens later. I'm pretty sure I've seen them there."

Henry looked down, aghast at his oversight and immediately backpedaled with a series of inarticulate noises. He managed to get the lamp replaced on the shelf without fumbling it and turned back, at a loss for what to do next.

"I don't need a night light, anyway," Tommy stated. "I'm not a child and I'm _not_ afraid of the dark. I've slept in lots of worse places, you know." On his fingers, he ticked off those places like he was trying to fulfill a memorization exercise. "On benches in the park, in the back seat of abandoned cars, in alleys--lots of alleys--, in people's sheds, in a graveyard…" He stopped, looked in surprise at his fully extended hand, then asked in the same tone as the list, "Is there anything to do around here? Detective Hanson's house had video games."

The recitation should have been heartbreaking, except there was a cruelty behind the words that gave Jo the sense Tommy was trying to make them feel bad. Even his request for video games felt like a calculated punch. 

_It's just survival,_ Jo told herself. _He's only acting like this to protect himself._ How many places had he lived in his life? How many different families had he lived _with_? And how had he come to living on the streets? Tommy had revealed to Rhonda that he'd been on his own for at least two years. His memory that far back had been surprisingly detailed. As soon as the topic of his parents came up, though, he relapsed into silence. As tempted as Jo was to press him on that point now--and to remind him that he Child Services existed to make sure he didn't have to sleep in alleys--Rhonda had warned her not to, since they were trying to get his defenses down, not raise them higher. Jo drew a steadying breath and brought her professional facade to bear. "I'm sure we can think of something."

Henry, who'd had the same warning impressed on him, clapped his hands together. "There're no shortage of activities to keep us occupied in our free time. Between my private collection and the stock in the store, we have a number of excellent books that are appropriate for a young boy. Are you familiar with the works of C.S. Forester? No? We also have a fine selection of games. Abraham and I often enjoy a nice game of chess in the evenings…."

Tommy rolled his eyes and resumed his circuit of the living room, dragging his fingers along every surface as he went.

So, he wasn't interested in reading or playing board games. That sounded perfectly normal for his age to Jo--the only perfectly normal thing about him--though she made a note to ask Rhonda if anyone had assessed whether the boy could read. If he hadn't been in school for two years, he might never have learned. It was but one of an increasingly long list of details they didn't know about the child--and with that lack of knowledge she now she had to figure out how to keep him occupied.

What did people do with kids in their evenings? Usually Jo was so exhausted when she got home from work that she was happy to relax in front of the TV for an hour before dragging herself off to bed. Some nights she chose to relax in the bath instead. It wasn't exciting, which was the whole point. She had enough excitement at work. Neither mindless TV nor bubblebath were going to be options with Tommy around. "There's a children's museum," she said, "and a Y right off the subway. I'm sure we could get short-term memberships." She scowled; those weren't going to work. Tommy wasn't just a kid, he was a protected witness. They couldn't take him places with crowds that compromised the police's ability to keep him safe.

"Do you know how to skateboard?" Henry asked suddenly. "I've recently become aware of a rather fine skate park. The half-pipe was a bit beyond my capabilities, though I did manage one pass on it without killing myself."

"You what?!" Jo's efforts to think of a kid-friendly, and witness-friendly, activity vanished at the image of Henry skateboarding. She was starting to come to terms with the idea that Henry had no discernible survival instinct, but this was still a step too far. "You went skateboarding? When did that happen?"

Henry brushed a thumb over his eyebrow. "I'm afraid it was Abraham's idea."

"I don't like skateboarding," Tommy declared, pulling himself deeper into the over-sized hoodie he insisted on wearing, "or children's museums or swimming." He looked like he was ready to stomp off to his room, if he knew which one it was.

Jo felt her patience fraying rapidly. She'd known the weekend was shot. Now it was looking like it would be turning into hell. "Well, what _do_ you want to do?"

Tommy's head tilted and his face scrunched up, a city full of options that she'd have to shoot down at his disposal. For someone who whose life was focused on attaining the basic needs of survival, he was slow to pick one. At last he asked, "Can we get ice-cream?"

As a cop, Jo was deeply familiar with the adage that everyone has a price. Over the years, she had seen any number of fellow police officers find their price and succumb, whether it was the lure of a different job with a bigger paycheck or regular hours or less stress … or whether it was an outright bribe in the form of money or drugs or status. Find the right price and a person could be convinced to do any number of things he'd have declared appalling, ridiculous, or even impossible under any other circumstance.

Tommy's price, it turned out, was a triple chocolate fudge sundae with extra sprinkles.

Jo called the order in and a uniform picked it up and delivered it. She wasn't going to risk taking Tommy outside at night at all. When Henry raised an inquiring eyebrow at her, she claimed weariness after a long day, and he chose to believe her.

They threw a blanket out onto the fire escape and had an impromptu picnic in the slowly darkening twilight. The chill of the ice-cream seemed to push the muggy evening air away, and to Jo's surprise Tommy was the one who melted.

"I like it up here," he declared after a few minutes of careful eating. He clutched the bowl tight to his chest, as if afraid that the dessert was going to be stolen from him any second. Yet with each bite, he uncurled from the hunkered position he'd assumed in the corner of the fire escape. Soon he had his jean-clad legs and dirty white sneakers swinging fearlessly over the edge.

The fire escape looked out on a side street that wasn't much more than a glorified alley. Parked cars were crammed along the brick walls that bordered the other side while electrical and telephone wires ran overhead. Jo felt a sense of timelessness; she could have been sitting in this spot, looking at the same sight anytime in the last century, with only the makes of the cars varying.

"I guess it has a certain charm," she admitted. "When I was a kid, me and my brothers used to go out on our fire escape all the time because our apartment wasn't air-conditioned." She pressed her milkshake against her forehead at the memory of those days of oppressive, humid heat that soaked their clothes and left every surface with a sheen of sticky moisture. It had been so easy to push that out of her conscious memory after she'd moved out. That wasn't the only difference between her neighborhood and this one. "It's quiet here, too."

Henry looked distressed at having to sit anywhere without a proper chair, but even he managed a smile. "Only a native-born New Yorker would think this is quiet," he teased. From somewhere down the block came the staccato bursts of an over-excited dog; in the distance sirens blared; underpinning it all was the constant hum of traffic. But there were no gunshots in this part of town and the sirens never came close. "It used to be much easier to find a moment or two away from humanity for quiet contemplation."

 _And far less easy to find ice_ , Jo wanted to say. A quick look at Tommy struck the comment because she didn't want to explain what she meant. "Yeah, well not all of us can grow up on private estates." She didn't know if that was true, actually. She'd never thought to ask. "Some of us _like_ being surrounded by people instead of livestock." Now she was just making assumptions spurned by the impressions she'd formed of 19th century life as depicted in PBS specials.

Henry licked a bite of his Rocky Road off his spoon with an almost challenging expression, like he wanted to see how many wrong speculations she could throw out before she got one right.

Tommy had pressed his forehead against a railing and was peering down toward the street. "Livestock. That means chickens, right? I used to have chickens. The rooster woke us up every morning."

"Used…to…Tommy, did you remember something from your childhood?" Henry inquired, all his playfulness vanishing as he leaned toward the child.

Tommy shrugged and shoved a biteful of chocolate into his mouth so large that Jo expected him to spit it back out as the inevitable ice-cream headache took hold. He did wince a little, but it passed so quickly that Jo wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't been watching. "Dr. S said I'll start to remember things when I'm ready for them." He swung his feet and added wistfully, "I hope I don't forget this."

So he wasn't the only one melting. Jo had been holding her vanilla milkshake until it thinned enough to suck through the straw. She took a draw while she composed herself. She didn't want to scare Tommy by appearing too excited. Carefully, she asked, "Do you remember anything else?"

He shrugged again. "Not really." Unhelpfully, he added, "I think we had a cow, too." His gaze slid toward her like he he was stealthily trying to check her reaction. That hint of calculated information sharing was back.

Jo took another sip of her milkshake, this time to hide her suspicion. Learning that the kid had grown up on a farm might help Rhonda narrow down where he came from, but it didn't tell Jo anything useful—except that Tommy was smarter than anyone was giving him credit for. _He's manipulating us,_ she acknowledged. For what reason, she couldn't yet guess. Though, it could be as simple as having a warm, dry place to sleep, given his earlier litany. "That's OK. Dr. S is right; you'll remember when you're ready."

She hung on to that, and to the tantalizing hint that Tommy might remember more than he was currently willing to share, over the next hour.

He changed into his pajamas and brushed his teeth without any complaint, then balked at going to bed. With the most doleful expression, he begged Henry for one of the recommended books from earlier. He asked for a glass of water and promised, without any inquiry into the topic, that he wasn't a bed-wetter, and that Henry didn't need to worry about his expensive furniture. 

"This is going to be harder than I thought," Jo muttered to herself. She was starting to understand why the Hanson boys had chosen not to sleep in the same room with this kid.

He refused to shut off the light in his room, then crossed his arms and glared daggers at Jo when she suggested a night light. Eventually, she threw her hands up in defeat and told him to do whatever made him happy.

Jo crawled into bed with Henry, too wiped to give any thought to the unfamiliar bounce of the mattress, the too soft texture of the sheets, or the too warm presence of the man next to her. "Do you think we should set an alarm?" She eyed the relevant screen on her phone and allowed a grim thought of despair at the possibility that she'd never be able to sleep in again. She'd better be getting paid for this.

"There's no need." Henry barely glanced over from the book he was reading to answer. He'd propped himself against a pile of pillows, the top sheet folded up neatly over his lap, cutting white across his old fashioned striped pajamas.

This was not how Jo had imagined their first night together. Not even close. She struggled to keep her eyes open, certain there was still something else she needed to do before drifting off. "What if he wakes up before we do? Shouldn't one of us be up first so he doesn't get into anything he shouldn't?" Her voice was turning to a mumble and she didn't know if Henry had heard the whole question.

Henry murmured an answer she didn't quite catch and turned a page. Perfect. They'd just moved in together and they were already acting like they'd been married fifty years.

Sometime in the night, Jo woke. Henry was sitting up only a few beats faster than her and had the bedside light switched on before Jo could tell him not to. The light blinded her; she blinked, trying to acclimate quickly before grabbing her gun and her phone, in that order. Strange noises in the night could be a break-in, and the last thing someone should do if their home was getting robbed was to draw attention to themselves. The safest action was to lock the door and call for help from someone on duty.

"I'll handle this," Henry told her. She heard the whisper of him pulling on his bathrobe and the slap of slippered feet on the hardwood floor. On his way past her side of the bed, he leaned in to place a gentle kiss on her forehead. "It's best if you wait here. We don't want to overwhelm him."

Jo's brow furrowed. She was already familiar with Henry's urge to rush off to investigate any kind of danger without heed for caution or discretion, but his desire to be considerate of the robber's emotional state was new. With her vision finally starting to clear, she reached into the bedside drawer for her gun. Henry never followed directions to stay put when she gave them; she wasn't about to let him go out with backup. Then she heard a strangled noise, like a muffled sob. No, it was a muffled sob.

"Henry?"

Henry stuck his head back in the doorway long enough to say, "A strange bed in a strange room surrounded by strangers is enough to frighten anyone. He only needs some reassurance…and perhaps a cup of hot cocoa. Go back to sleep."

She didn't think she would, didn't think she could. Tommy wasn't the only one in an unfamiliar room and now that she was awake, she became acutely aware of the way passing headlights outside threw shadows on the ceiling in shapes she'd never seen before.

Once she'd identified the noise that awakened her as sobs, they only seemed to grow louder. In the span of a few hours, she'd seen Tommy's moods range all over the map, but he'd given no indication of being afraid. Now he was weeping from what? A nightmare? Homesickness? Panic attack? It could be any of them, or all of them, and she didn't know what to do. Henry did, though, and he'd slipped into the role of father so easily. She pulled the sheets tighter around her body and curled into a ball on her side of the bed. The air-conditioning made no noise, though the waft of cold across her face from the floor vent kept her listening for one. It was something to focus on besides the murmuring that drifted through the wall that divided the two bedrooms. Jo felt like she should be doing something to help, only she couldn't imagine what. 

As she finally drifted back to sleep, it occurred to her that seeing Henry-as-a-father was not what he meant by getting to know each other better, though it only happened because of it. What she was losing in physical intimacy, she was gaining in personal insight.


	12. Saturday - Jo, Henry, and Tommy

"Abraham is usually the chef around here, though I have been known to help him out from time to time." Henry started rolling up his sleeves as he entered the kitchen, Jo and Tommy trailing behind him. They'd spent the day in the apartment, with Henry ducking downstairs in the morning for a few hours to keep the shop's Saturday hours and Jo going out for a few hours in the afternoon to run some errands. She'd let Tommy curl up with her laptop and watch movies all day after discovering that Abe had Wi-Fi running in the apartment despite Henry's protests to the contrary.

Now it was time to consider plans for dinner, and Henry had insisted on the three of them cooking. "I'm certain that between the three of us we can manage to produce something edible. What sounds good? Chicken cacciatore, beef stroganoff, braised lamb shanks? I can telephone the grocer and have him send over any ingredients we don't have in stock."

"Why don't we keep it simple?" Jo suggested. More times than she could count, she'd listened to Hanson rant about how all his boys wanted to eat was "Chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese. If we're lucky, they'll sometimes allow a carrot near their plates." He always concluded by demanding to know "What the hell kids ate before chicken nuggets and mac and cheese were invented, anyway? Their boogers?" After Henry's amazing display of father-sense the previous night, she was astounded to learn that he was so oblivious to the strictures of a child's diet. Braised lamb shanks? That didn't even sound good to her.

She started poking around the kitchen to see what supplies Henry kept on hand. Her own fridge held a couple containers of yogurt, a bottle of ketchup, and the container of creamer she used in her coffee. Sometimes there were leftovers from the deli she purchased most of her dinners from. One person who didn't spend a lot of time at home didn't need much. Henry's fridge, on the other hand, was packed. Assuming Henry did have a grocer in town who took phone orders and provided delivery service, she saw no room to put anything. The freezer wasn't just full; its contents were also labeled. He had to have stocked up and organized in preparation for her stay, which struck her as both thoughtful and a little desperate, like he was worried about what she'd think of him on his home turf.

"Do you have pasta? We could do spaghetti and meatballs," Jo asked as her eye fell on a package of ground beef. It wasn't on the Hanson-approved menu, but it seemed common enough to have a chance of pleasing everyone here.

"We keep linguini, angel hair, and fettuccini in stock," Henry answered, without consulting his inventory. "Will any of those suffice?"

"Angel hair will work." To Tommy, Jo explained, "It's like extra thin spaghetti. Does that sound good to you?"

"Yeah, sure," he drawled, sounding like he still needed convincing on that point. He peered slowly around the kitchen. It wasn't meant for three people to move around in at the same time; three people who didn't know each other's cooking routines were likely to end up getting in each others' way more often than not. "Unless it's too much work. I can eat anything." He shrugged, ducking his head. "I'm not really picky about food."

No, he wouldn't be. Living on the street would've taught him to eat anything he could get his hands on. The amount of food surrounding them right now had to torturous for the little boy who had learned the hard way that he couldn't assume he'd ever have enough to eat.

"Come on," Jo said, pulling him fully into the room and pushing him toward the counter. Nothing she did now could erase the time he'd spent hungry, and nothing she said could convince him that he'd never be hungry again. The best she could offer was the assurance that _right now_ none of the food here would be withheld. "There's nothing to be afraid of. Anything you want to eat while you're here is yours. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks...you name it. You can help. Why don't you get out the things we'll need?" She pointed at the cabinet where the pots and pans were, pleased with herself for remembering that one. "There's a big saucepan in that one. We don't have much else we can do without leaving the apartment, so let's make a mess."

Henry winced at the word 'mess,' but fortunately didn't argue. "Cooking is an essential skill. I have never in my life regretted being able to prepare my own food." That was a ringing endorsement, if Jo had ever heard one. "I may even have a secret or two worth passing on."

Jo turned away before Tommy could see her expression. She almost missed his own muttered, "I doubt that."

They got bowls and pans out and started the meat defrosting in the sink, and then Henry got serious. He directed Jo to fill the kettle and set it on the stove to boil, with the declaration that there was no better aid to digestion than a cup of tea.

With that done, and Jo now out of the way, Henry took over the task of locating the ingredients for their meal. "The secret to a good marinara is fresh vegetables," he informed them. "Ideally, we would harvest the vegetables ourselves from our garden. As it's difficult to maintain one of those in the allotted space of a city apartment, we shall have to make do with those the grocery provided." He began pulling vegetables from the drawer and handing them to Jo, who spread them on the table. To Tommy, he said, "It may interest you to know that when Europeans first discovered tomatoes, they assumed the fruit was poisonous."

"I know," Tommy grumbled, catching one of the named items before it rolled off the table. He plunked the tomato back on the table and crossed his arms. "It's because tomato plants are related to nightshade plants. They were being safe because nightshade is very, very poisonous and if you eat the berries, you'll die." By the end, he was bobbing his head back and forth like he was reciting a warning he'd grown tired of hearing.

Henry straightened up, unused to being beaten to his trivia. "That's…correct. Symptoms of Nightshade poisoning include diarrhea, hallucinations, and paralysis. It's an unpleasant way to die."

"I _know_ ," Tommy whined.

Henry threw a look at Jo. "Is this what they're teaching in school these days? I wouldn't have thought there's much call to provide instruction about the vagaries of the nightshade family."

Jo winced at the reference to school; Tommy wouldn't have gone much. "I learned about tomatoes from a Fruit Roll-Up Wrapper," she said. "I think it's pretty much common knowledge. The poisoning stuff is news to me, though." But wouldn't be to someone raised on a farm. Jo's eyes narrowed speculatively. Something about this conversation wasn't as straightforward as it appeared. If only she could put her finger on what it was.

"Interestingly, Europeans did not make the same mistake with the bell pepper, which is also a member of the nightshade family. Now garlic—" Henry dove back into the depths of the fridge, opening and closing the drawers with fervor—"Garlic's medicinal properties are, to be blunt, legendary. I know Abe had garlic in here. Where did he put it?"

"We're going to need a cutting board," Jo interrupted. No doubt Henry knew every detail of garlic's medicinal uses, but they'd never get the sauce simmering if they had to listen to them all first. "Henry? Cutting board?"

Henry interrupted his muttering long enough to wave a hand at a cabinet and say "top shelf" before resuming his search.

"I'll get it!" Before Jo could stop him, Tommy jumped up on the counter.

In between one breath and the next, she saw the accident unfold with the inevitability of an instant replay. Tommy's shoe caught on the handle of a lower cabinet and his knee slipped off the granite. He lost his balance and started to tumble backward. While scrabbling for purchase, he grabbed the handle of the kettle.

The water was just beginning to boil. Its rumble had risen up under Henry's chatter and had made a couple false starts at blowing the kettle's whistle. Tommy's grasp pulled the kettle over. His hand came down on the now vacated burner and the hiss of sizzling flesh filled the gap of the silenced water.

He yelled out and hit the floor with a loud thump. The kettle crashed to the floor on top of him, its lid popping off. Hot water splashed over his legs, eliciting another yell of pain.

For a moment, the three were frozen in shock: Henry with his mouth open in a warning he had no time to deliver, Jo with the utensil drawer half open as she started a search for the tools they'd need, and Tommy on the floor with one leg of his jeans soaked, his injured hand held in front of him, and his desperate blue eyes locked on Jo.

Before she could get to him, before she could see anything, he tucked his hand close, then dove past her and raced out of the kitchen. Jo rocked back. She'd seen that expression before: the wide-eyed terror, the silent pleading for the viewer to unsee what she was seeing. Richie had appealed to her exactly the same way when he'd skinned his arm.

"I'm going to attend to him," Henry said. He slipped out after Tommy before she could stop him.

From elsewhere in the apartment, she heard the bathroom door slam shut and a shouted "Go away" from Tommy.

"I am a doctor," Henry answered. He had his professional voice on, the one he used to make everyone bow to his expertise. "Let me take a look. You might need medical attention. Burns are not an injury to be trifled with."

Tommy wasn't having it. "I said go away! I'm fine." His plea sounded distant through the barrier of doors, yet it powered straight to Jo. He was hiding something; that's how people sounded when they were trying to feign innocence and knew they weren't.

"Tommy, open the door this very instant," Henry ordered. "I only want to help. The sooner we get those burns treated, the better." He pounded on the door then rattled the handle.

"What burns?" The door swung open and Jo heard the sudden silence of Henry and Tommy staring each other down. "Do I _look_ like I need your help? I'm going to get changed, if that's all right with you." He stomped away, leaving Henry hemming and hawing in his wake.

Jo's eye landed on the puddle of water spreading out from the toppled kettle. Steam rose in thin lines that left a smear of condensation on the bottom half of the nearby cabinets. She smelled the hot tang of a burner left on with nothing to warm and, lingering underneath, the acrid scent of burned meat.

It couldn't be.

Could it?

Had she really missed such an important detail?

Jo lowered herself onto a kitchen chair, her mind churning frantically through the details of the case, rearranging around this new possibility. If Tommy was Immortal...it would explain a lot. Not everything. Unless it did. As much as she'd learned about those Immortals, she still didn't know enough to be certain, and this wasn't a topic on which she could afford to be less than certain.

Tommy had been hurt. That, she couldn't doubt.

But he'd also been scared, like a child who'd been abused and who'd learned the hard way that mistakes only resulted in greater punishment. Tommy refused to talk about his parents or how he'd come to be on the streets. _He's distrustful of everyone,_ Rhonda had said. It was possible that's all his reaction was about.

She couldn't go around accusing people of being Immortal, or immortal, without incontrovertible proof—no matter if she'd never be able to share that proof with anyone official.

Jo'd learned a lot about successful detective work over the years. At the top of the list was a lesson a lot of new detectives struggled with in their eagerness to make a name for themselves: Use your resources.

"OK," she answered to the empty room. "I'm going to step outside and make a phone call."

She couldn't yet swear to what she suspected, but she knew the people she could ask to help her.


	13. Sunday - Liam & Jo

Liam's fingers slipped over the page of the open book in front of him. Its words were more familiar to him than any name he'd ever lived with; he could say—and probably had said—them in his sleep, but today he found no comfort in them.

He'd never been easily rattled. Having the mercenary and con-woman Talia Bauer as his teacher, not to mention the one upmanship volatility that Amanda and Jade brought to his earliest years in the Immortal world, taught him very quickly to roll with uncertainty and to exercise a certain amount of moral flexibility. Yet, sometimes it only took a small nudge to destabilize a man.

Such as the phone call from Jo the previous evening.

He paced the length of the office, tracing a path between the ornately framed photograph of the Pope on one wall and the simple, hand-carved crucifix on the other, looking at both without managing to see either. Overhead, the air vent clicked with the effort to push some tepid air into a room that was growing warm and stuffy.

In the months since Henry had introduced Jo to him, she had never sought him out. She had never spoken to him without Henry nearby, nor had she ever given the impression that she wanted to. Then, out of the blue, she'd called him up with a question that could have been innocuous, in any other context: "How can I tell if someone's Immortal?"

Had the question come up during their recent brunch, he'd have thought nothing of it. He'd caught the professional distance she used when she was on a case, and had responded in kind with a clinical answer. It wasn't until he was saying his nighttime prayers that he recognized the question for what it was: a warning of another Immortal in the city.

Liam recalled all too well what it was like living there when Duncan MacLeod's semi-annual arrivals led to every Immortal with a grudge flocking there after him. On Amanda's advice, he'd refrained from introducing himself to the younger Highlander—and found any reason to stay on Holy Ground. Somehow, he'd made it through. Two decades later, he lived a continent away, and in a place where he thought he wasn't going to have to be so, well, cloistered.

Then young Richie Ryan had moved to town, and it wasn't quiet anymore. The recent uptick in activity was starting to make him worry that Richie had taken more from MacLeod's tutelage than mastery of a sword. If that was true, Liam knew he would be wise to leave the city before the activity found hm.

He didn't want to leave. He was coming up on his third anniversary in New York City. Though the community was a lot less Irish than it was the last time he'd lived in the States, he thought he was fitting in well here. So, barring any surprises in his upcoming annual job review, he saw no reason he'd be moved to a new parish any time soon.

Yet….

Was he ready to live with the kind of danger— _temptation_ , a small voice whispered—that Paris had once presented?

Plucking at his robes, he sought to dispel some of the trapped heat before he sweat through them.

Liam could feel himself slipping, feel the edges of his vows softening. A compromise there, an exception here. He'd started sword training again. As much as he insisted it was only to help a friend, there was no question that strengthening his own skills would only make him more comfortable choosing to fight rather than run—should he ever have to. And he'd started spending more time off Holy Ground, increasing the chances that he'd meet another Immortal who wanted to fight.

Because of this, if he did leave, he'd need for it to be a total break—for now, anyway. It wouldn't last forever. He'd been able to stay hidden from Sean for two hundred years without trying very hard, and he'd known of other Immortals who'd successfully avoided specific conflicts for centuries, but eventually paths crossed and heads rolled. What mattered was the interlude and the chance it gave to prepare. If he left, he'd have to go in a way where Richie wouldn't be able to find him, no matter how much he'd regret losing the friendship they'd developed.

The church was quiet on this Sunday morning, in the short time between Masses. The early morning crowd had left and the later one was only starting to trickle in, based on the occasional voice that filtered through the door. With a visiting missionary handling the first Mass, Liam had no responsibilities until late morning, so he'd locked himself in the Church office where no one could hear him talking to himself.

Steeling himself against the sound of his own voice done wrong, he opened his mouth and began to read. In a new cadence, with vowels shoved into new parts of his mouth, the phrases' friction chafed against his intentions. He had to practice, to teach his lips and tongue to take their new forms as easily as the ones they already knew. The depth of his native Irish lilt had mellowed over the years, true, and his vocabulary had changed with the times, but there was no mistaking his origin. That had been lazy on his part. As the Irish priest, he was too identifiable in Immortal circles, which is why, if he had to go, he couldn't take his heritage with him.

A light tap on the door interrupted him. A second later, the door cracked open and the braided head of Luisa, one of the altar servers, appeared in the gap.

"Perdóname, Padre?" She was twelve and normally boisterous and extroverted, though the manners others complained she didn't have were always on display for him.

Liam snapped the book shut, as if needing to hide what he'd been reading, though Luisa had no reason to see anything odd in the priest reading before Mass. "Sí," he answered, automatically responding in the language he'd been addressed in. Many of his parishioners here spoke only Spanish, leading Liam to revive an old habit of switching languages as necessary. It didn't matter to him; like most Immortals over a century, he spoke a number of languages fluently.

"Hay un visitante para ti." She glanced back over her shoulder, then quickly stepped aside when the announced visitor pushed the door the rest of the way open and let herself in.

Liam had no chance to question the boldness of such a move before he recognized the person. "Jo! ¿Qué puede hacer por ti?" He heard the sounds come out scrubbed free of his brogue, and wasn't surprised when Jo looked at him oddly. His gaze slid back to the open door, looking for the second person he expected to see. "¿Dondé Henry?"

"Estará aquí en unos minutos," Jo responded, smoothly, then: "Did you forget that I speak English?" She tugged at the neckline of her t-shirt like it was constricting her, then shoved her hands in the pockets of faded jeans. The outfit was a lot more informal than Liam usually saw at Sunday Mass, though people increasingly didn't dress up the way they used to. Liam didn't mind; what people wore had no bearing on their worship. Since Jo didn't have her gun and badge on, the rest was inconsequential, if oddly more informal than her usual style, as well.

Liam cleared his throat and hid his momentary embarrassment at the language gaff in the acts of putting the book away and sending Luisa away. "My apologies," he answered. "I didn't expect to see you until later. I thought we'd agreed to meet this afternoon." Jo gave a tilted smile that confirmed that she'd changed the plans. "Are you here for Mass? You're certainly welcome--"

Jo shook her head. "Maybe some other time. I just wanted to talk to you…only, I see you're busy." She took in the alb he wore and stepped back like awareness of the garment had sprung up a force field between them. "Didn't you say you weren't presiding this week? Did I mishear you?"

Liam had only insisted on setting up the meeting with Jo for after the Masses because he'd wanted to attend the services and perform the usual greetings and good-byes with the regulars. Also, he'd been looking forward to having some time when no one would ask anything of him. "I wasn't until about an hour ago," he explained. "The priest was called to give Last Rites, otherwise I would've been happy to reschedule our appointment…" The thought dropped off without conclusion because something had to be wrong. Jo wouldn't come to see him without Henry; Jo wouldn't change their plans without asking. He didn't think that 'something' was Henry—or, at least not related to Henry's swimming proclivities—because she also wouldn't show up and stand around obviously hedging if Henry needed help.

Before he could inquire, the presence of another Immortal swept over him. His head jerked up and the instinctive panic that his Immortal sense engendered caused him to suck in a breath before he relaxed again at the knowledge of whom it had to be. "Is that Richie? Are you here with him?" He'd hoped Richie would start joining them. If anyone was in need of a church community, it was the lad. He started for the door, eager to welcome his friend. "I should go make sure he doesn't try to sit in the front row; Mrs. Garcia will not appreciate having her seat—"

"Liam," Jo interrupted, staying him with a touch. Something in her attitude said that she knew what he'd sensed, and didn't seem surprised—unsettled, but not surprised. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

Without any fanfare, the other Immortal had disappeared from his perception, which raised no concerns. The sensory range was fickle; all the other Immortal had to do was find a seat in a part of the nave that was too far away to be sensed. "I really should have a word or two with him before the Mass starts," Liam explained.

"Wait, isn't Richie busy this weekend?" A look of wariness furrowed Jo's eyes for an instant, then smoothed.

Liam cocked his head; wouldn't Jo know this already? "He was supposed to be. His new girlfriend is in town. He must have brought her by to introduce us." Leaning closer, he added, "She's mortal, you know. He might be in need of a prayer or two. Aren't they here with you?" 

"Richie had a girlfr—" Jo cut herself off. "It doesn't matter right now. And, no, they're not. He's not. It's been a few days since I talked to him last. What you…felt—" She handled the word like she wasn't sure it was the right one—"…that wasn't Richie. I don't think."

Liam's newly elevated mood fell as his earlier suspicions were realized. He pushed shut the door he'd started to open and gave the handle an extra wiggle to make sure the latch had caught. "You brought another Immortal here? Without warning? You didn't think to mention this last night when we spoke?"

"I didn't know for sure." She hesitated, biting down on her lower lip, before adding, "Liam, he's just a kid. You haven't seen him; not yet, I mean. He's so scared, so angry. At first I thought it was because he was a street kid or abused—maybe both—but, I think it's more than that. I don't think he has any idea what's going on."

A child? Liam'd heard of that happening, though he'd never personally encountered a child Immortal before. Pre-Immortal orphans had found their way into his care often enough through his Church affiliation, yet all had made it to adulthood before meeting their first death—if they fell to violent means at all. It was hard to remember that not all pre-Immortals were so lucky. Palming his face, he shut his eyes and tried to process why Jo was telling him this. He was the least equipped of all the Immortals she knew to deal with a child, though there was an obvious first step: "He's going to need a teacher."

Jo's mouth dropped open in horror. "What? No! He's a _kid_ , Liam. He should be learning how to skateboard and divide fractions, not—" Her voice dropped to a grim whisper—"how to kill people. You don't and you're an adult. Why does he have to?"

"You know why," Liam answered, and he saw Jo pale and recoil. That truth would always be the sticking point with her, which Liam understood. He also understood that this wasn't one of those times when they should pretend it didn't exist. "Living outside the Game is a choice I can make for myself, in full awareness of the consequences. It is not a choice I can make for him. Nor can you, or Henry, or anyone else. There can be only one. Would you deny him the chance to be that one?"

"But—"

"We're Immortal, Jo. He'll need to learn what that means, assuming he doesn't already know. All of it. For that, he needs a teacher."

Who did he know who'd be willing to take up that responsibility? Liam swept his gaze across the bookshelves on the back wall as if he'd find an answer among the hagiographies that filled the shelves. They were, oddly, his best bet; it wasn't like Immortals kept personnel directories.

"He's so young," Jo countered.

Liam stopped his cursory searching and met Jo's eyes straight on. He needed to drive home the point that Jo was letting Tommy's physical appearance cloud her judgment. "You know that for a fact, do you?"

Further pressing of the point ceased at the light knock on the door. Before Liam could answer, the door swung open, revealing a stern-faced Luisa. The server robes hung loose on her thin frame, though she didn't shrink in them. " _Padre,_ " she said, the earlier politeness gone, "You are late." He'd never heard her speak English before, and for a moment he didn't react as his mind tried to parse the wrong language.

Glancing down at his watch, he asked, "What time is it?" The number he saw explained the impatient murmuring he now heard coming from the nave. Jumping to attention, he straightened his robes and sent a silent prayer of apology skyward. "I'll be right out," he told Luisa. To Jo, he continued, "If you'll excuse me, I have higher responsibilities to attend to." With pushing motions, he ushered her out of the office. "I'll be available at our scheduled time, if you'd like me to meet with him then."

Jo looked like she wanted to stay and argue, only she still had enough Catholic in her to back down. That residual training came through as she responded with a bowed head and a "Thank you, Father."

Liam watched her retreat down the hallway; she'd figure out soon enough what he already knew: Tommy was no longer in the building.

Which meant that Liam wasn't going to be leaving it—not until he had a better handle on the situation. There'd been too many Immortals coming to this city recently and, child or not, Tommy was one of them. Like it or not, Liam was going to have to step up his efforts to change his accent. Perhaps he would ask Luisa for pointers.


	14. Sunday - Jo, Henry, and Tommy & Jo, Hanson, and Reece

Liam's church didn't have the kind of population into which Henry could easily blend. Standing at the back of the nave, Jo surveyed the gathered crowd, searching for Henry's dark-haired head or Tommy's light-haired one. She saw no sign of them, yet she knew they had to be there. Liam's reaction had confirmed that--and a lot more.

The warmth of the day already filled the room, eased only by the fresh air that entered whenever someone opened the main door. In their seats, the parishioners shifted impatiently: the squeak of rubber soles against the stone floor, rustles of fabric against wooden pews, and the aggravated murmuring of people who were tired of waiting. Then the chime of bell rang through the open room and suddenly all attention shifted to the front.

Jo took this opportunity to slip out, only a step ahead of the twinge of guilt at leaving Mass before the service began. Next week she'd do her diligence, she promised herself. She'd make things right then. At least, some things.

She found Henry and Tommy less than a block away, on the far side of the parochial school. Tommy sat curled tight, his back pressed to the privacy wall, his arms wrapped tightly around his knees. Henry crouched across from him, as if to block rubberneckers in the passing traffic from seeing him. Or to be ready to catch him if he tried to run again. Jo pulled to a stop when she saw them and walked the rest of the way toward the duo slowly, taking care not to let the heels of her boots click against the cement.

"What's wrong?" She directed the question at Henry without taking her eyes off Tommy. She wasn't in the mood to chase him even farther across town, never mind having to explain to Reece how she had lost their witness.

"He's being reticent," Henry explained. "It seems that this outing may have been too taxing on top of all the other recent stressors." It was a perfectly reasonable explanation--or, should have been on any ordinary day with an ordinary child. But Tommy wasn't one of those, was he?

Except: _How?_ He was a child, still a year or more away from starting puberty. He couldn't be a sword-wielding, serial killing, unaging Immortal as a _child_. She'd never bought into the myth of childhood innocence -- if she had, the antics she and her brothers got up to would have cured that long before police work did -- yet she still couldn't reconcile what she saw with what she knew.

"Perhaps now that we've had a moment to collect ourselves," Henry continued, "we can try again?" He pulled a crisply folded handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to Tommy, while he caught Jo's eyes with a hardened, beseeching look, willing her to follow his thought process as one parent might when surprised with the need to explain the truth about Santa.

"I'm not going," Tommy responded into his legs, taking no notice of either Henry's explanation or handkerchief, "and you can't make me."

Jo lowered herself to a crouch in front of Tommy. Though it was supposed to put her at the child's level, the position only left her feeling smaller and more off-balance. They were putting a show now: of normalcy, of ignorance. It wasn't a part she liked playing, but what they really needed to discuss couldn't be addressed in public. She pressed the tips of her fingers to the cracked sidewalk in a bid to find some stability and her words tasted bitter as she asked, "What are you afraid of? It's only church. Didn't your parents ever take you to church?"

Despite all the practice she'd had at controlling her emotions, directing the flow of the conversation, and--more recently--dealing with general weirdness, Tommy saw right through her questions. His face emerged from his pillowed arms. His eyes were swollen and red, and yet they showed no glimmer of moisture as they dared her to reveal what she knew.

Jo had wondered if Tommy would question the distance they'd traveled to come to this church, bypassing all the other Catholic options along the way. She'd wondered if he would question her insistence on arriving at the church a few minutes in advance of him and Henry.

And she had wondered if his sudden flight from the building was a coincidence, perhaps related to some as-to-yet undisclosed trauma. For all she knew, there was someone else in his congregation who was Immortal. It was a splinter of doubt, yet still enough to irritate the conclusions it was embedded in.

Without speaking a word, Tommy confirmed everything. All that remained was the act of saying it out loud.

"My parents are dead," he stated, instead, as if Jo had somehow failed to grasp this fact the last several times he'd mentioned it. One tear trickled down a grubby cheek and his bottom lip began to quiver. "Can we go back to the apartment now? I'm tired."

They did, with Jo kicking herself the whole way.

So, now she knew. Tommy was Immortal. No, Tommy was the Immortal who'd killed Drake. No one else had been there who could have done it.

No one else had been there.

That should have implicated him from the start.

Instead, this whole time she, Hanson, Reece, Henry, Rhonda, and every other person who'd seen Tommy at the crime scene that Tuesday had assumed he was an innocent bystander because he was a child.

Because he _looked_ like a child.

With his tear-stained face and ragged clothing, he'd sold himself as helpless, just as he was doing now. Just as, Jo realized, he must have done any number of times before and had mastered. Through sobs, he'd claimed not to remember anything. He was homeless. He was terrified. He needed their protection. And every single adult had swallowed the story whole. God, she was such a fool. She had all the pieces and she'd been too blinded by her assumptions to put them together.

Her only consolation was that Drake had make the same mistake.

_And he'd gotten killed for it._

It's all part of the Game, she thought bitterly. For whatever consolation that was. It's all part of that goddamn Game that kept landing in her jurisdiction. A year ago, she hadn't any inkling that Immortals existed, and now she could hardly walk a block without tripping over another one--all of them with murder on their minds.

Abruptly, she recalled Richie's reaction to the photos. He'd been horrified at what he'd seen in them. _"He didn't die as part of the Game," he'd said._ He didn't explain how he'd come to that conclusion, and Jo had never thought to question him, because all she'd heard was his sudden vow to avenge Drake's death--an event he had shown no interest in at all until he saw the second picture.

She looked anew at Tommy. If he was Immortal, and Drake had been Immortal, then what made this decapitation different?

An answer floated into her consciousness: Tommy had cheated.

If he could--if he _would_ \--do that, what else was he capable of?

"How would you like to approach confronting him?" Henry asked, in one of the few moments they managed to grab out of Tommy's earshot on the return walk. He had his pocket watch out and was rubbing a thumb over the etched surface like he did sometimes when he was deep in thought.

"I don't think we should." Jo heard her response before she realized she'd made one. Tilting her head, she listened to herself, and then decided she was making sense. No matter how strange the second part sounded when it came out. "I think we need to talk to Richie first. You trust him." She couldn't admit that she did, too; she wasn't there yet. Given all the opportunity and motive, he'd still never lied to her. In her book, that was invaluable.

With a nod, Henry hummed his agreement. "It's always wise to gather all the information before rushing to action." He looked at Tommy, clomping down the steps to the subway in his worn out sneakers, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his hoodie. "In this case, I believe discretion and wisdom go hand-in-hand. While we're practicing those, what shall we do for lunch? There's a new Indian takeout near the shop. Do you think our young ward would be interested in sampling curry?"

* * *

Returning Tommy to Rhonda's care Monday morning wasn't the relief Jo thought it'd be. Rhonda had asserted from the beginning that Tommy was deeply traumatized. PTSD, she said. Abandonment issues. Issues with authority, with trust. She advised committing Tommy to a full time psychiatric institution so he could get round the clock care. She insisted that the instability of the foster care system would only damage him further, if that was possible. She'd put his name on a waiting list and called in some favors to get it bumped up.

But it wouldn't matter because Tommy wasn't a child. All his little digs at how everyone expected him to act made sense now. He'd been a child too long—however long it had been—and he resented everyone who wouldn't let him grow up. He was the ultimate Lost Boy who was tired of waiting for Peter Pan to come for him.

She pinched her eyes and leaned into the elbow she'd planted for support on her desk the next morning. Paper crinkled ominously. In all her years on the force, Jo had seen her share of cases that started cold and never had a chance of being anything else. Putting some effort into those had never bothered her because she could at least take pride in having _tried_. Not this time. She'd solved the case, yet even if she found enough evidence to make the case stick against Tommy, there'd never be a trial. There _could_ never be a trial.

"What I can't believe," Hanson stated, "is how only one person saw anything." He rolled his chair over to her desk and leaned back in it, resting his coffee mug on his stomach. "There's eight million people in this city. You'd think more than one would be at a park on a spring afternoon. No one remembers that natty suit checking into or out of their hotel. None of the regular dog-walkers or joggers remembers seeing him. It's like he popped into existence on that park bench and forgot to bring his head with him. What kind of yahoo does that?" He crossed his feet at the ankle, settling in like they were in a living room and not the middle of the bullpen. Around them hummed the noise of the other officers and detectives talking on theirs phones, clicking on their keyboards, rustling as they stood up and sat down. "I'll tell you what kind," Hanson continued. "The kind that doesn't play by Earth logic."

Jo blinked against the pressure of her fingertips. Sparks of color burst behind her eyelids. "Are you seriously suggesting that this is supernatural?" she asked. She kept her head down so Hanson couldn't read her expression. Bad enough that they _were_ dealing with something supernatural. For Hanson to have figured that out was…more than she could handle, really. He was the most grounded person she knew, the one who succeeded as a detective because he assumed that every problem had a simple solution and he wasn't afraid to put in the leg work until he found it.

"Nah."

"Then what are you saying?" Jo finally allowed herself to look at her partner. They weren't far enough into the day for his suit and shirt to have gathered wrinkles along with the minutes. The tie had been an early sacrifice, though. It hung unknotted around his neck, and looked to be on the verge of slithering off.

"I think we're going about this all wrong. We've been missing something. I'd say it shoulda been obvious, 'cept no one's mentioned it. Not even Morgan." He spoke as if it were completely unbelievable for Henry to let a detail slip by unremarked. "We've got a vic with no head and no identity and a witness with no memory." Jo nodded, confirming the summation. What she'd learned since then was off the books. "So what else don't we have that we should?"

 _A sword_ , Jo thought. Henry had declared the murder weapon to be a 'long knife,' which might be his way of keeping the two beheadings from being connected. Different weapons likely meant different culprits. Then again, it could have been a long knife. Jo wasn't clear on when a blade stopped being a knife and became a sword, nor did that detail seem to be important right now. No one had found the murder weapon. They also hadn't found the sword that Jo knew Drake carried. He'd had one with him in the diner and he was wearing the same jacket at the park. He could have been beheaded with his own sword, though it was more likely that the killer had supplied his own. So where were they? Certainly _someone_ would have come forward if they'd seen a person running through the park carrying a severed head and a bloody sword, New York City's famed cynicism, be damned.

"I don't know," she answered, instead. "What else?"

Hanson slapped a hand down on his thigh; the coffee cup jumped, though nothing spilled. "Blood."

"Blood," Jo repeated. There'd been blood. She definitely remembered blood. She stared at her partner, and he stared back, a satisfied smirk tugging his mouth into a shape she wasn't used to seeing. What was he getting at?

"Aw, come on, Jo," Hanson weedled. "You've seen decapitations before. You've seen people with slit throats and head wounds. What's the one thing they all have in common? Blood. Lots and lots of blood."

Diving into the pile on her desk, she yanked out the folder with the crime scene photos. The one of the body alone wasn't useful; any gore would have been cleaned up before the picture was taken. The wider shot of Drake still sitting on the park bench told a more accurate story: peanuts on the ground, a few drops of water glistening on the grass from the surprise rain storm that had lasted long enough to clear the park, a few darker splatters on the bench. The storm could have washed the blood away, she supposed. Except Drake's clothes were dry. He'd died after the storm swept through—and there wasn't enough blood.

How had she missed seeing it? Is that what Richie had noticed, too? Something told her it wasn't.

"The one in February didn't have a lot of blood," she stated. That's how the detail had slipped by her, slipped by Henry. They both knew that Immortal beheadings were relatively clean affairs, and they'd brought that knowledge to Drake's crime scene. Jo's esteem for her abilities dropped. Knowing the truth about what was going on had prevented her from seeing the case as she was expected to, as she needed to, if she was going to solve it from a police perspective.

Hanson scratched his head, brow creasing into a deep line. "Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. It was dark. There was all that vandalism. Besides, we got that one solved without having to worry about a few pints of O negative." He took a sip of his coffee and mentally put that case back in the closed drawer. "The new guy, he was obviously moved. Instead of trying to figure out who he was, let's—Lieutenant?" He looked up, and Jo became aware that Reece had drawn up behind her.

"Good thinking, Detective," Reece spoke, with a nod toward Hanson first, and then Jo. Her arms were crossed low on her stomach, lips pressed into a thin line. "Why don't you two step into my office and I'll finish solving the case for you. You're not going to like this one."

Sparing only a glance at one another to see if either had any idea what this summons was going to reveal—neither did—Jo and Hanson rose from their chairs. Hanson set his cup down on the corner of Jo's desk, pushing aside her keyboard to make enough room. She had a feeling they were both going to forget it was there.

Reece shut the door behind them, though she didn't bother to draw the shades this time. Jo let out a small breath; whatever news was coming wouldn't involve a trip to HR.

"First of all, I want to commend both of you for your diligence on this case. I know how difficult it is to conduct an investigation when all the channels for getting information are closed." Reece leaned against the front edge of her desk, though the fact that her arms were still crossed undercut the show of informality. The office was chilly today; air-conditioning that barely affected the heat in the rest of the building was instead putting all its effort into this space. Where everyone else had ditched their jackets or blazers, Reece had kept hers on and buttoned it up. Jo shivered, wishing she had thought to grab hers on the way in.

"What's going on?" Hanson asked. He appeared unaffected by the temperature, though Jo suspected that his mood might be offsetting the cold.

Reece smiled grimly. "We received an anonymous call this morning from someone who claimed that our John Doe wasn't murdered; he was merely misplaced."

"I'm sorry, what?" Jo asked, unable to hold her question in. "Did they mean his head was misplaced?"

"That was my first thought, too," Reece answered. "The caller claimed that a body was taken from the NYU medical school. Some kind of prank. The caller did not give names, and the call was placed from what is probably the only functioning pay phone on the campus. I sent someone to check it out in case the call itself was a prank; it wouldn't be the first one."

Jo and Hanson both nodded at that. People liked sensationalism, and they especially liked stirring the pot from afar if they felt the story wasn't sensational enough on its own.

"It appears that the tip was accurate." Reaching behind her, Reece selected a file on her desk without looking and handed it over to Jo. Hanson shifted closer so he could see it. They were holding a photocopy of the forms used for donating a body to science. The information on the upper right was obscured by a picture of the man Jo had met, the image of the paperclip bisecting his face. "In life, our John Doe was known as David Franks." Jo's brows jumped at the name, so similar to the one he'd introduced himself as, yet enough unlike it that if she had come across it in her search, she'd have skipped right over it. Richie and Liam both kept their first names when they switched identities. Henry, as far as she knew, kept his whole name. She'd somehow expected that Drake would do the same.

Reece continued, "He was forty-five when he died from an aneurysm. His family donated his body, and his head was removed post-mortem for a dedicated study."

"No blood," Hanson grumbled.

Jo let Hanson take the file so he could look at it closer, if he wanted. She did not.

Reece had explanations for everything. Worse, she had signed paperwork from Dr. Washington, the Chief Medical Examiner, stating that Drake's—sorry, _Franks's_ body—had been refrigerator-cold when it was found and not body temperature, as Henry had noted, as Jo had noted. Between that and the intake paperwork featuring Franks's description, officially the bases were covered. No one had stepped forward to claim participation in the "prank," though such a claim would undoubtedly lead to expulsion, so no admissions were expected. That was the only thing missing.

__Jo locked her hands behind her back while she listened to her case be pulled out from under her with her heart pounding ever louder in her ears, her teeth grinding. How was anyone not questioning this new information?_ _

__She managed to wait until she got back to her desk before blurting out her true thoughts: "That's bullshit!" She slammed her hand on the wooden surface; paper, pens, the keyboard, and the coffee mug all rattled from the force._ _

__Hanson grabbed for his mug before she could knock it off the desk. "Problem, Martinez?" he asked._ _

__"Yeah, there's a problem." She leaned closer to her partner so that her voice wouldn't carry back to Reece's office. "We already have a stunning lack of witnesses. Are we really supposed to believe that _no one_ saw anyone carrying a headless corpse across town? _No one_?" There was no way. The logistics of getting a body out of one building, over to the park, and set up on the bench were too complicated to have left no witnesses. Not in the middle of the day. Plus, the scenario Drake's body had been found in would've taken time to set up._ _

__She was tempted to pull Hanson aside and try to explain what she really knew. She _had_ the right answer, and now she was looking at a complete fabrication that didn't fit anything she knew to be true. She'd heard about cover-ups before, but had never expected to be caught in one. So, this was how the Immortals managed to stay hidden. Funny how none of them had bothered to mention this political machinery to her. Still, she wanted to assert the real story to someone, to know that she and her partner were on the same page. They had to work together, which meant they had to trust each other. How could she trust him if she thought he was so easily deceived?_ _

__Hanson met her question with a level gaze—and Jo saw in the set of his mouth that he was simply being pragmatic. "You really wanna push this?" he asked. "We were spinning our wheels on this case and you know it. Unless that kid was going to sing, we had nothing to go on. Now it's not our problem anymore." His chin jutted out with an afterthought. "And we don't hafta bank on a witness whose testimony had no chance of holding up in court."_ _

__Jo blinked; she hadn't thought of that. Assuming that Rhonda even signed off on Tommy delivering a testimony, the sheer number of diagnoses on him all but guaranteed he'd have no credibility. A sharp pain stabbed behind her eyes and Jo dropped into her seat. Hanson perched himself on now-vacant corner of her desk, still cradling his mug. "We might have found something," she protested. She did have a name to research. She had options she could have pursued. When Kostya was in town, Henry had told Jo about the Watchers. He said all the Immortals had them, so Drake must have had one. Jo could have found the Watcher and—_ _

__She shook her head. It didn't matter. The case was gone. She'd wasted a week of her life working on it instead of her other cases and she'd lost a weekend alone with Henry, and it didn't matter. There was nothing left to investigate. Cover-up or no, Tommy would have ended up right back on the streets. She couldn't stop him, and now she didn't have to try. She suddenly felt relieved that she hadn't confronted Tommy about his Immortality and hadn't had time to contact Richie. Now she didn't have to do either, nor figure out how to deal with the consequences of what she learned._ _

__"You're right," she said. The pain vanished; the tension ebbed out of her body. "It's not our problem." She and Henry still had 10 days left; that was plenty of time for a tryst. It was almost like a Honeymoon, and she had every intention of treating their time as such._ _

__"Knew you'd see it my way," Hanson replied. "So, how 'bout we go top up our cups, take a few minutes to refocus, and then look through those interviews for the Wisniewski case." He stood up, taking point on the expedition to the lounge. "I've got a good feeling about that one."_ _

__Jo followed, feeling more relaxed and confident than she had in a week--yet unable to shake the feeling that she was still missing something._ _


	15. Monday - Richie & Emily, Richie and Methos

Emily stuck her arm out and inspected her pinkened skin, a smile creasing her eyes. "It was totally worth it," she decreed. "I can't remember that last time I've had so much fun! And Overheard at the Bar was there!" Her volume and pitch both rose with her excitement. A couple of people seated nearby glanced at her, grinned, and did a bad job of looking away while she continued. "I heard they canceled, and then it turns out they didn't, and I actually got to see them. _You_ got to see them instead of just hearing me talk about them." She sucked in a breath and launched into an even louder question. "What'd you think? D'you have a good time? I know some of the other music wasn't exactly your thing…."

Richie's own grin broke through his mounting concern about how much attention Emily was drawing to them. Had he been this effusive when he was her age? God, he had been, hadn't he? He so owed Mac an apology. From Emily, though, the enthusiasm and boldness soaked in him and made him feel … _young_ again. He hadn't realized how much he needed that until he found it.

"Are you kidding?" he answered, "I had a great time. OK, so some of the acts were a little weird—" He flashed on the group that had done their entire set while hanging upside down by their knees from exercise bars they'd brought up to the stage along with their guitars—"but it didn't rain, the food was good, and no one got sick from it. And I had some pretty awesome company." Leaning in, he met Emily in a kiss. She had a fruity lip gloss on in a flavor that defied identification, though he tried. When he finally pulled back, it was only because he felt stares from the other passengers in the bus station piling on them. "I can't remember the last time I had so much fun, either."

It was the truth, too, and one he was happy to share, though she couldn't possibly understand all the layers that formed it. They'd made it! A whole weekend together, much of it spent dancing or sipping cold drinks in what little shade they could find in the tree-spotted park, like they were a completely normal couple. There'd been no Immortal interruptions: no swords, no Challenges, no one recognizing him who shouldn't. For whole hours at a time, he'd managed to forget that he wasn't the guy he appeared to be. And he really liked it.

"Yet, without a mark to show for it." She shifted around in the pretext of wanting to compare the colors of their arms. Next to his tan, her burn looked painful enough that he was surprised she could joke about it. "I've never known someone who didn't need to use sunblock at all."

Now, here they were, killing time while they waited for Emily's bus to get called and she'd managed to hit him with a stark reminder of what he was. It was always the little things that tripped him up. Just like that, the high of honesty crashed.

"I guess I just have good skin," he answered, trying to keep his gaze from sliding away from hers with the slipperiness of the half-truth. He could burn; he did burn. And his Quickening healed it almost as fast as it happened. Fortunately, his Quickening didn't treat tans as a kind of damage that also needed to be healed. That would be harder to explain for someone of his coloration.

"Normally, I do too." She frowned at her shoulder, which was red enough to look like part of a shading pattern extending from the strap of her shirt. "I hope this is healed by the weekend. It'll be a bitch-and-a-half to compete with a sunburn."

Eager to change the subject, Richie latched onto this opening. "You have a competition? I thought the semester was over. Does the gymnastics season last longer into the summer, or something?"

"Well, we don't exactly get to _stop_ training just because grades are in, you know?" She pursed her lips like she was considering the merits of the idea, then rejected it with a shake of her head. The "E" pendant on her necklace caught in the dip of her collarbone with the action and Richie freed it with a light touch that felt almost natural and that earned him a grateful smile. "Actually, it's more like an exhibition. We're putting on a show for the local high schools. It's a recruitment thing. Less judging and more judgment, if you know what i mean." She brightened. "You should come out and see it. You could meet _my_ roommate—she'll actually be in town this weekend, hard as that is to believe—and, then…" She trailed off before she could issue the best part of the invitation because the crackly announcement they'd both been anticipating came over the speakers. Emily sighed. "That's my bus."

"I'll get your bag," Richie offered.

She glanced down to where the navy Jansport was tucked between her feet. "I'd tell you I could carry it myself, but, truthfully, I'd like you have an excuse to walk me out to the bus. Also, I had no idea a few pieces of vinyl could get so heavy, or that there'd be so many records there to choose from. Good thing I didn't have to waste all my money on a hotel room … and that you and Matt didn't turn out to be serial killers or something, because that would've been awkward. Anyway. So, about next weekend…?"

 _Yes_ , he thought. _Hell, yes_ , followed a beat later at a painful twisting in his gut, not unlike an opponent running a sword through him, at Emily's flippancy. She _really_ had no idea, and it didn't seem to bother her. _Awkward_ didn't come close to what it'd have been if she'd found out who he and "Matt" really were.

They'd made it through one weekend together, and so far weren't even officially dating. But, if this kept going, the longer they were together and the more serious they got, the harder it was going to be to make those inevitable tough decisions. 

_Stay cool, Ryan. Keep it casual. Ish._

"Let me check with Me—Matt first and see if he can cover my classes. I'll text you later, OK?" He sped through the last few words in effort to cover up his slip, lunging for the backpack at the same time.

That's when the sense of another Immortal pushed through his awareness. He started to tense, his weight shifting for better balance, his free arm coming back to his waist in the anticipated need to strike out in defense — and then he caught himself.

Dozens of people filtered through the bus station heading to or from one of the loading zones; dozens more packed the seats, some waiting for a later pickup and some merely looking for a place to sleep out of the elements. There were cameras everywhere, and two bored police officers in full uniform who were clearly itching for some action to brighten their days. Whoever the other Immortal was, he wouldn't dare attack Richie in front of this many witnesses— 

—assuming he could even pick Richie out of the crowd at all. 

Remembering Liam's lesson, he forced his shoulders to relax and for his eyes to stay on Emily instead of searching the room as she agreed that a text later that evening would be fine and … other stuff. He thought she might have mentioned Matt again.

Abruptly, she stopped talking, her gaze darting down to her backpack and up again. "Do you need help? I didn't buy _that_ many records, did I? We can carry it together, if you want."

"I've got it." Richie forced his fingers to close around the padded shoulder strap—a sensation his mind screamed was all wrong in its expectation of a solid metal hilt—and finally finished a simple grab that shouldn't have taken anywhere near the time and effort it had. 

"If you say so," she replied, a sing-song in her voice like she didn't quite believe him. "Come on. I wanna get a good seat. Maybe I can get one all to myself..."

He was barely aware of the next few minutes: escorting Emily out to the bus, helping her board, kissing her goodbye. The flush of heat from her touch only thickened the fog over his mind.

He was so sunk. 

'Casual' was off the table.

It was just icing on the cake that the Immortal waiting for him inside the bus station was Methos, lounging against one of the blocky support beams with his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his longcoat. He'd been so good about making himself scarce during those parts of the weekend when Richie and Emily had to be at the apartment, so what was so important that he had to show up now? Letting Richie have those few final minutes to enjoy his weekend of normalcy was clearly too much to ask.

Richie peered around the waiting room, in case Methos wasn't the only other Immortal in attendance. Plenty of other people were looking their way, though none with that particular expression of suspicious wariness that two Immortals always shared on finding each other. The fast beat of some pop song sprang from the speakers, its rhythm loud enough to puncture the disgruntled murmuring of the bus station's denizens without being loud enough to identify. Richie squeezed his eyes shut, blocking out the one annoyance while he tried to figure out what to do about the other.

“What're you doing here?" he finally asked, deciding on the direct route.

A mirthless smile flashed over Methos' face, and he turned and strode back out the main door—with Richie following like he was being led on a string. Only a few paces separated them, so Richie lengthened his stride to catch up, just as a businessman with his wheeled-briefcase stepped onto the sidewalk between them, nearly getting body-blocked for his poor timing.

"Matt, wait up!" Richie called, while he fumbled with righting the luggage and getting out of the businessman's way before this chance encounter also turned into a bigger deal than he wanted to mess with.

Methos spun around, walking backward for a few steps until Richie finally reached him. A sudden gust of wind rippled his hair and tugged at the bottom edges of his coat, though everything in between held defiantly steady. "You finally got my name right. See, that wasn't so difficult, was it? A little more practice and I think you'll have it down."

"Seriously, man? That's what you couldn't wait another ten minutes for? I told you I'd get it right." Richie bit back the admission that he'd only barely managed it. "Or was there some kind of _teachable moment_ in Emily's departure that I'm supposed to be learning from? I'm not going to turn around and find Angie or Nikki getting off the next bus, am I?" Running into his former foster sister Maria had been shocking enough for both of them. He couldn't imagine what would happen if he encountered one of his old friends who _had_ attended his funeral.

"No," Methos stated, simply, quietly. He'd admitted that Richie and Maria actually meeting had been an accident — and he'd apologized for it — but he spoke as if he still regretted it. "I…"

They'd reached Richie's motorcycle, and Methos stopped mid-sentence and nodded significantly at the young tired-looking mother who passed them with a screaming toddler in tow. Richie wasn't always so good at picking up hints, especially when his mouth was running, but this one he got. He shut up. Soon enough, the coast cleared and Methos pulled back one side of his coat and extracted the sword he'd concealed within, carefully holding it point down so there was no interpreting the movement as an attack. Richie's sword. Why was he carrying Richie's sword? The removal temporarily left the side of the coat unbalanced until Methos resettled its weight with a practiced roll of his shoulders that made it clear that Richie's was not the only blade secreted inside.

"Wha—?" Richie started.

"I thought you'd want this back. Heaven forbid you go a minute longer than necessary unarmed."

Richie took the sword and slipped it quickly into the scabbard attached to his bike before any of the other approaching travelers could see what he held. The explanation, though, wasn't so easily accepted. He'd done fine the whole weekend, granted the music fest had a strict "no weapons" policy which meant that everyone in attendance was unarmed.

"Uh-huh. So, what's the real reason? Because I gotta tell ya, man, you look like you're about to melt in that coat, and I don't believe for one second that you put it on and came all the way out here just because you wanted to be altruistic."

"Altruistic? That's an awfully big word—"

"Want me to define it for you?" Richie interrupted, before Methos could add the 'for someone so young' that Richie could smell coming. Even so, he leaned back against the bike, legs crossed at the ankles. He had nowhere to go and nothing that needed his attention for the next few hours, so there was no reason not to enjoy the bickering. Besides, if he held out long enough, he might just be able to talk Methos into buying him a drink.

Methos flashed that smile again, like he was on to Richie and was sorry he couldn't keep playing along. "The fact is," he said, "now that your girlfriend is safely out of the way, there is that small matter that needs to be taken care of."

Richie squinted back toward the bus station and fiddled with the straps on his helmet while he mentally worked through what Methos was saying. When he got there, he sighed. So much for not having plans. "Lemme guess: It's my responsibility to drive up and down the streets of New York City, hunting for one specific person who may or may not still be in the state, because that's what the great Connor MacLeod would do?" He already knew the answer; by moving to the city in Connor's absence, he'd accidentally stumbled into becoming its protector from the Game the way Connor had designated himself to be. "D'you have any idea how long that's going to take?" Or how impossible it would be? The ability for one Immortal to sense another wasn't that strong.

"That's why I'm going to help," Methos answered. "I'll take Central Park. You start with the park where Drake was killed. First one to find him gets a head."

Richie's mouth dropped open; there was no staying cool with a pronouncement like that. Methos was going to _help_? He was volunteering to go head hunting instead of holing up in a nice air-conditioned bar somewhere? That explained the swords, but… 

"Why?" Richie blurted out.

"Because this is a mess that needs to be cleaned up once and for all. The police are already involved. What's next, the media? Our lives are not meant for public consumption. Hashtag ‘WhoWantstoLiveForever.’" He shuddered, his face paling.

The visceral horror of the idea was too much. He could only nod in silent recognition that Methos probably — certainly — had plenty of reasons beyond the obvious to want to keep mortals from learning about Immortals, and specifically himself.

"Fine," Richie agreed, composing himself, "but you're paying for the gas." He straddled the seat, settling his helmet into place, and had one more thought. "And you're going to cover my classes next weekend."


	16. Monday - Jo & Henry; Wednesday - Jo & Henry

Henry was waiting for Jo when her shift ended, his scarf knotted, jacket buttoned, and bouquet in hand. "I had hoped to present these to you on Friday," he said, giving the flowers to her with a flourish that shone with the simplicity and ease of long practice. 

It was roses. A dozen red roses, all of which displayed only perfectly formed petals without a hint of wilting or bruising. No way had these had been sitting in his office over the weekend, which meant he had just purchased them. They'd already moved in together and he was still courting her. He couldn't know that she hadn't received flowers since…well, since Sean's funeral. And those hadn't meant the same thing at all, had they? A knot tightened in Jo's stomach, a day's worth of ignored anticipation tangling at once into a physical expression that clogged her throat.

She managed to mouth a "thank you," only several beats later remembering that she also had to take the flowers. Her hand brushed past his, and she pulled it back to wipe it off on her pants leg before trying again. What was wrong with her? Already, she was fumbling. 

Henry had to have noticed, yet like a true gentleman he covered her gaff with his own apology. "Alas, I was unable to secure a dinner reservation tonight on the short notice available."

He offered her a small, gentle smile, as if aware that his statement could be interpreted as blame when he wouldn't dare mean anything of the sort. With the Drake case officially closed, Tommy stopped being a witness, which meant he stopped being Jo's responsibility almost as fast as he had become it. She'd called to tell Henry as soon as she could, leaving them both once again adjusting their plans together on only a few hours notice.

"There are, however, a number of fine restaurants available that don't require a reservation," he continued, "though I'm afraid their menus will be somewhat less extravagant on a Monday night than a Friday."

The talk of food pulled a rumble from Jo's clenched stomach. Normally, she'd hit the deli on her way home from work. It was an old, well-established part of her routine. Between her schedule and Sean's, there hadn't been any time for cooking when they were together. After he died, she hadn't wanted to; cooking for one was too difficult. Needless to say, her standards for food excellence weren't high.

"I-I don't need anything extravagant," she protested. "There's still leftover spaghetti from Saturday and pizza from last night…." Not to mention all the food he had stockpiled. "Honestly, I'd prefer to stay in and heat something up." She bit her lip as the double entendre of what she'd said registered. So much had happened in the last few days that she no longer knew where she and Henry stood. Were they really supposed to go back to his apartment that night and pick up as if the derailment of the weekend hadn't happened? The paper-wrapped flowers in her hand could be taken as a backtracking of weeks, or they could be an apology, or … simply a thoughtful gesture?

But her meaning glinted in Henry's eyes, and Jo caught the twitch of his eyebrows that was prelude to a smart rejoinder. "I believe I have just the thing to satisfy that appetite—now that we have the place to ourselves." Drawing closer, he held his arm out for Jo to take. "Yes, perfectly seasoned with anticipation." The heat from his body seemed to flow across the gap between them and meld with hers as their arms interlocked.

She could get used to this, having someone who met her where she was and wanted to help her get where she was going. That was new. Already she saw how much easier that support would make whatever life threw at them next. And life, she knew too well, didn't have any depths to its cruelty.

A rush of post-work people filled the sidewalks outside the station, which threatened to make Jo and Henry's two-abreast navigation treacherous, if not impossible. Though she was tired and ready to settle into her civilian role, Jo kept her focus sharp, seeking out the elusive and ever shifting gaps between pedestrians that would allow the fastest and least difficult route to her car. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people brushed past them or crossed in front of them, coming together briefly at the crosswalks, then peeling off again. Like her, they all had somewhere better to be, all these people seemingly acting in concert while fulfilling private motivations.

She was still missing something. Jo felt a scowl of concentration tug at her face. Her work was not so easily left at the office, no matter how much she might want to, and the facts of the case—the real facts—about Tommy and what had happened continued to churn over in her mind. He had still killed Drake, and done so in a way that upset another Immortal. That was worth paying attention to. Being let off the hook did not magically make Tommy innocent, just as being let off the case did not erase what she'd learned while on it. And now he was back out there, back to his tricks.

"We never could help him," Henry stated, "no matter how much we wanted to help him. And he doesn't need us anymore." 

Jo's attention jerked back toward Henry, surprised at the wistfulness she heard. "He never did, did he? I mean, I know he's not really a kid…." He wasn't. He _wasn't_ , and she'd have to keep telling herself that until it sunk it. "It just feels like we should have been able to do _something_ more to help him." Of all the associations she now had for Tommy, she now flashed back to the image of him eating ice-cream on the fire escape, a smear of chocolate on his chin. His loneliness had been palpable in that moment. Maybe they could have gotten through to him then. Or maybe that, too, had been a deception. She let out a sigh that was heavy with all the missed opportunities in her relationships. The perfume of the flowers wafted back at her. Reminded of why she had it to smell at all, she pulled the bouquet up to her face for a proper, appreciative sniff. "These really are beautiful. We should get them into some water before they wilt."

The corner of Henry's mouth pulled up in a grin. "I have the perfect vase. Old world, etched glass. Would you like to return to my apartment with me and see it for yourself?"

Yeah, she wasn't going to miss this opportunity again. A grin tugged at her own lips despite her efforts to keep a straight face as she replied, "Your etchings, Henry?" The sudden increase in their pace told her she'd read him right.

* * *

They tumbled through the apartment door, eager to get all the way upstairs before the clothes started coming off. With the ice broken on Monday, they'd fallen right through into a honeymoon phase that picked up every day as soon as their professional obligations ended. 

Henry managed to get the door kicked shut before Jo got her hands back under his lapels and started pushing him up the stairs. A weekend of frustrations, the constant sense of having overshot or of having aimed the wrong direction entirely, had left Jo desperate to grab every moment she had left with Henry. And Henry gave every sign of agreeing.

Hot and breathless, they stumbled past the top riser and onto the landing. Jo was laughing through the kiss that had carried them up the flight and Henry was scrabbling to get a hold on her ass when a faint noise stayed her. She pulled back, suddenly sombre, while swatting at Henry's hand.

"Someone's here," she hissed.

"Who could…?" Henry started, the question bit off as he turned and got his answer.

Tommy was in the living room, sitting on the back of the couch. His legs weren't long enough to touch the floor, and his feet swung with the casual air of a person who had no cares in the world. He was whistling softly through his teeth; the sound that had alerted her. The warm haze of arousal disappeared under the spike of adrenaline as her police training took over. That's when she saw that Tommy's hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his over-sized hoodie, concealing something with enough weight to pull the front down.

"Tommy?" Jo asked, glancing around as if Rhonda was going to step into view next. She hadn't heard from Rhonda since passing Tommy back into her care on Monday, not that she'd expected to; they had standing promise to have lunch in the near future. "What're you doing here? Did you forget something?" This could be innocent; this could be a simple miscommunication, though she didn't believe it was. She started to reach to her purse and the phone inside, to check if she'd missed a call or a text and stopped as she caught the innocent blue of his eyes transform into something cold and hard. He had a gun.

He had her gun.

Jo hadn't taken her gun on the walk she'd insisted on today. When she wasn't on duty, she liked to leave her weapon off-duty as well, especially now that the temperatures had warmed enough to make a blazer or sweater prohibitively uncomfortable. As Henry's apartment didn't come with a gun safe, she'd taken to leaving the weapon in a trick drawer in the living room secretary. The drawer didn't have a lock, per se, but it could only be opened if two of the other drawers were opened first. They were both opened now, left as if Tommy had been in too much a hurry to clean up after himself before getting into position to greet Jo and Henry on their arrival. His being armed—and her not being—changed how she needed to approach their interaction.

"You're so young," she remembered saying to Richie when she first met him. The way Henry had talked about him, she'd expected to meet someone her age. No, she'd expected to meet someone who _looked_ her age—crows' feet deepening around the eyes and mouth, gray hairs sneaking into a receding hairline, a body that was softening in front and flattening in back—and what she'd seen was an obvious teenager. She'd felt deceived then, and she still had to consciously remind herself that he was her age, that he wasn't trying to deceive her.

Here was someone younger, whom she now understood was undoubtedly much older. And much more monstrous.

"You know—" Tommy peered up toward the ceiling, his lips rolling together while he formulated his next sentence—"I thought you two were different. I thought you could be the ones I'd trust. Normal. Happy. Typical. Good, solid middle-class jobs. Nice digs." He gave a satisfied nod at his assessment. "It's the ideal situation for a foster kid to grow up in, don't you think? Solid prospects, not a lot of scrutiny or expectations."

Henry took a step forward, subtly pushing Jo to get behind him. She resisted; like it or not, Henry was a civilian, and Tommy had officially been her responsibility. Behind her the stairwell gaped, easily accessible for a quick exit. She could get outside, call for backup. Except, even if she got Henry to follow her, they'd both be sitting ducks for the few seconds they were on the stairs if Tommy decided to open fire. No, she was going to have to stay and deal with this herself. She swept her gaze around the room, searching for anything else she could use as a weapon in a pinch—provided they couldn't talk their way out of this standoff first.

"What is this about, Tommy?" Henry asked.

"But, you're not typical, are you?" Tommy continued, as if Henry hadn't spoken at all. "You know all about me, about my kind." His dangling foot kicked the back of the couch and left a smudge of dirt behind. "That was your plan, wasn't it? Win my trust and then 'introduce' me to your Immortal friend. Was he gonna pay you? Is that the deal? You get a kickback for every head you bring him?" Slipping from the couch, he landed with a thump on the wooden floor. From his pocket, he pulled Jo's gun. He pointed it at her, holding it steady, though both his little hands barely wrapped around the handle. The dark metal seemed to take all the light in the room and focus it on the little hole at the end of the barrel. "I bet it really chuffs you that I ruined your plan."

Jo raised her hands, setting them on top of her head in what she hoped Tommy would accept as a sign that she wasn't a threat to him after all. "That's not how it was," she answered. "We thought you were new. We never would have let anything happen to you. Immortal or not, you were under police protection."

The sneer that tugged at Tommy's lips told her that it didn't matter what she said; he knew his interpretation was the correct one.

And he was going to kill them for it.

In the back of her mind, a small voice informed her that this is what Tommy did; this is how he survived, by using people for whatever protection or care he could get from them, and killing them when he perceived they'd become a threat.

"It's the truth," Henry was saying. "We had no desire to hurt you. Father Liam is peaceful, and you would have met him on Holy Ground. You would've been safe there; he would have _helped_ you. We can still help. _I_ can help you, Tommy. More than you know. "

 _Oh God, no,_ Jo thought, wincing internally at Henry choosing now to bring up his own immortality. Tommy was so far gone that he'd only see Henry's admission as further proof that they'd been lying to him. "Henry." She needed to stop him before he said anything he couldn't take back.

"My name," Tommy responded, "is Kenny. You can stop pretending you didn't already know that."

Jo saw his fingers tightening, and her training kicked in. She dropped just as the gun went off. The bullet hit her ribs and skated around the outside of the bone in a searing stripe. Her bra strap twanged as it was sliced through, and she rolled, trying to get behind any piece of furniture she could use as a shield.

"Jo!" Henry shouted. He threw himself at Tom—Kenny, knocking him to the floor. He grunted as the boy's flailing arms and legs connected with his body. The gun went off once, twice more. Muffled, meaty thuds of bullets impacting at point blank range told Jo everything she needed to know. Henry was hit. Kenny squirmed out from under him, only to be thrown to the floor again when Henry grabbed his legs and yanked. The gun flew from Kenny's grip, and Jo lunged after it.

No longer caring that she was facing a person who looked like a child, a person she'd let herself start to care about, Jo sighted on Kenny's chest and pulled the trigger. The bullet slammed into him and knocked his small body backward. He fell, his face a mask of outrage and surprise.

"Oh my God," she said, as she watched his blood begin to stain Henry's carpet. "I killed Kenny." It was too surreal, but she'd had to kill him. He'd shot at her, at Henry. 

Oh God, Henry.

Ears still ringing from the gunshots, Jo crawled across the floor to where Henry lay. He already looked too still. "'You bastard,'" she prompted him. "Come on, Henry, say it: 'You bastard'."

"Jo?" Henry said, his voice weak. His head lolled as she pulled it into her lap. The smell of copper and cordite settled around them. "Why?"

She choked out a desperate laugh; how did he not know the joke? He didn't know, and now she was never going to be able to explain it to him. He'd been hit twice: once near the heart and once in the right lung. Blood had soaked through his white dress shirt and darkened his vest. His breath came in wet gasps. He was dying.

"Hang on, Henry," she ordered. Where was her phone? She needed her phone. Needed to call for help. Needed—

His hand came up, searching for her face. "I'll be OK," he reminded her. "You know what happens next?"

Jo rocked back because she _knew_ ; she knew and she'd still forgotten. She forced herself to think, to work through what he'd told her about his unique physiology. 

"You're going to vanish," she said. 

Vanish, after he died. She was going to have to watch him die, and then she was going to have to watch him disappear. What if he didn't come back? She cut a glance to Kenny who hadn't disappeared, who would also be coming back. Different types of immortality, they'd told her. Different ways of responding to mortal wounds with the same result: death was temporary. She understood that, but with Kenny lying dead three feet away from her and Henry bleeding out on her lap, it was so hard to _believe_ it.

Henry nodded weakly. "Come get me?"

All their discussions, everything else they'd been through together, and this was the big test. This was the moment where it all became real. "Of course," Jo promised.

His expression smoothed, turning peaceful. "It's time." He lay back, then suddenly jerked, trying to sit upright. "My watch!"

Distasteful as it was, Jo reached into the soaked cloth and tugged his pocket-watch out, unclipping the chain with a flick of her thumb. "I've got it." She held the blood-tarnished timepiece up for Henry to see and he gave another weak nod. On impulse she dove into his trouser's pocket and retrieved his money clip, too. "And this," she said.

"Thank you," he mouthed. His head tipped back, eyelids gave a final flicker, and then he was gone. Actually gone.

Jo looked down at the now-clean pocket-watch still looped around her fingers, the now crisp folds of 20s, and abruptly flashed back to Sean's wake. She'd clasped his cold hand and begged, _begged_ him to blink, to breathe, to come back to her. He couldn't really be dead. The body before her wasn't really him. The mortician had done a good job, but it didn't take a genius to see that casket's occupant wasn't Sean. Only it was, and he couldn't come back.

Henry would, she reminded herself. Henry would always come back.

Not until that moment did Jo realize how much she needed to know that. Painfully, she pushed herself up. Henry's blood was gone; her own stained the side of her shirt and stiffened the leg of her jeans. She couldn't go after him looking like this.

First, though, she retrieved her handcuffs and locked Kenny's hands together. Snapping the metal around his wrists felt so redundant; she pretended he was merely playing possum as she squeezed the cuffs tight enough that he couldn't slip his hands out, using the leg of the secretary as an anchor point. Henry didn't keep any rope laying around the apartment that she saw, so she grabbed a couple of his scarfs to bind Kenny's feet with. _Please don't let Abe come home early,_ she thought.

The ringing of her phone shattered the heavy silence of the room. Jo jolted. For a brief, horrible instant, she mistook the sound for the doorbell and she panicked, casting her gaze around in search of an exit before someone could burst in and discover her tying up a dead child. Her heart thumped wildly against her ribs, sending stabs of pain back from the wound.

"Martinez," she answered. To her own ears, she sounded guilty, all her lies and half-truths and omissions bursting like asphalt on a boiling summer day. She should have let the call go to voicemail. Certainly the caller would be able to smell the stench through the phone connection. She hadn't even had the wherewithal to check who was on the line before committing herself.

A beat of silence followed, like the caller didn't trust the connection, then Reece's voice came through. "Jo, I hope I haven't caught you at a bad time." Jo snorted softly to herself and reached over to straighten Kenny's feet. One of the sneakers had a hole over the big toe. "I've just received word that Dr. Syzmanski was assaulted this afternoon. She was discovered by a neighbor badly beaten; she's in critical condition..."

Reece continued on, providing more details that Jo wasn't ready to process, though she did her best to respond with the right noises in the right places. Officially, no one knew who'd attacked Rhonda. Unofficially, everyone did. Only one person had the motive and opportunity and couldn't be accounted for. Reece signed off with the imperative that Jo keep an eye out in case young Tommy came looking for her next.

"I will," Jo promised, looking once more at the still, silent boy. _He's not a child_ , she thought once more, still not quite believing that what her eyes told her wasn't the truth.

Leaving the trussed up corpse in Henry's living room, she went to tend to herself. She found a first aid kit under the bathroom counter, well-stocked as she expected any doctor's would be. The medicine cabinet yielded a selection of prescription drugs—all made out in Abe's name—ranging from painkillers to cholesterol medicine. She hesitated only a second before helping herself. This was an emergency. Even so, she broke the pill in half before swallowing it, enough to take the edge off without violating the warning label's suggestion not to operate heavy machinery.

Stripping off her shirt, she finally got a look at the wound: a long gouge across her ribs that was bleeding freely. She'd need stitches. It could have been worse: If her reactions had been a microsecond slower, if she'd fallen left instead of right, if Kenny had aimed differently. She'd gotten lucky out there. Gauze and tape would hold her together for now until she could have Henry patch her up, off the record. She couldn't go to the ER for this. The mandatory reporting for a gunshot wound would be hard enough to deal without all the concomitant questions she couldn't answer. 

A touch of the wound darkened her fingertips in blood. Was this really going to be her life now? _Could_ this be her life now?

* * *

That answer became stunningly simple when she saw Henry trudge out of the river. He was alive. Goosebumps covered his skin and his teeth chattered with cold, but the wounds were gone and he showed no hint that he'd been dying only a short while before.

Jo met him with a towel she'd grabbed, wrapping it around him before anyone else saw his nakedness. "You're really alive," she said. She threw her good arm around him and hugged him as tight as she could, for as long as she could stand it before her nose wrinkled in involuntary disgust. "And you _really_ stink." Dead fish, fetid water, motor oil, she didn't know what else. He'd been treading in the river while he waited for her, long enough for the reek to attach itself to him like a bad reputation.

"An unexpected consequence of us treating our rivers as sewers," Henry agreed. He pulled the towel tight around him as they headed for the car. Frowning, he added, "It's still better than the Thames."

Rivulets of water ran down his chest, and Jo kept reaching over to wipe them away. With each brush of her fingers across his skin, she grew more certain that he was really there. On one pass, Henry caught her hand, pressing his own over his so she could feel the steady lub-dub of his heart beating. His skin warmed beneath their combined touch, and in his brown eyes Jo saw only understanding of what she was doing and why. This was the man she'd fallen for. She leaned in to kiss him, and gasped as the movement sent a flare across her ribs.

"You're hurt," Henry declared, pushing her back to arm's length so he could give her a once over.

"I only got a little banged up; nothing you need to worry about," she said, twisting away. She didn't want him fussing over her now. "Besides, we've got bigger problems." She'd pulled the car to a hasty stop on the embankment and thrown her rotating light on the roof to keep anyone from interfering. In the early evening light, the swirling red and blue were all but lost. The same light that was keeping anyone from asking questions also kept drawing their curious stares, though she knew all the onlookers would promptly forget what they were seeing. Funny how easily standing out and blending in could become the same thing. She slid into the car, then had to stop to rest. The pill had reduced the pain in her side to a dull ache, yet was also making her sluggish. _Get through this,_ she told herself. _Get through this and then you can sleep._

"Kenny?" Henry asked.

The wrongness of the name jarred Jo, like Tommy and Kenny were two different people and she'd been mixing them up all along. "We need to do something about him. He tried to kill us." Henry shot her a wry look, and Jo could only shrug. At least her right shoulder still worked. "You know what I mean." She squeezed her eyes shut with the recollection that Kenny's attempts on their lives weren't isolated. 

"Where is he now?"

It should have been a simple question, but the combination of painkillers, shock, and emotional dissonance had her thoughts flying, and for a second, Jo didn't know the answer. Then it came it her with the echo of the gun's report through her memory. "I shot him. I—I killed him." As much as she understood that his death was also temporary, she'd never forget the feeling of squeezing the cuffs onto his tiny, still wrists; the cuffs almost hadn't tightened enough to be effective. "He's right where I left him."

Henry nodded, then twisted around suddenly and leaned into the backseat. The towel that he'd tied around his waist came unsecured and flopped open, exposing the length of his near thigh. Jo allowed herself to take a hand off the wheel and pull the towel back into place before she gave in to the urge to start stuffing dollar bills into the waistband. She couldn't afford any distractions now. "He'll be safe there, as long as no one tries to break into the apartment while we're gone," Henry commented, a crinkling in the corners of his eyes giving away that he found the mere idea amusing. "As for the question of how long he'll remain deceased, I can only speculate. I've been trying to convince Richie to allow me to conduct experiments with an eye toward answering that question, and so far he's refused."

"He doesn't want you to kill him for the lulz?" Jo translated. She didn't know where that word choice had come from. It had to be the pain meds. Or too much time around Hanson's kids. Either was possible.

"However, when we first met, Richie had been dead for several hours before he revived, so I would reasonably guess that we have some time to figure out what to do." Leaning forward, Henry ducked his head to look under the passenger seat. "Did you happen to bring any clothes? Abe usually keeps spares in the trunk."

"Clothes, no," Jo answered, with a cringe at her oversight. She'd greeted a naked Henry on the shore of the East River often enough that she should have thought of that. "Sorry. I wasn't thinking. I remembered a towel!" That had to be worth something for her first go at this. On that thought, though, she blurted out, "How is it that you can _die_ so frequently that you've figured out how to prepare for it? Even in my line of work, most people don't get close to death _once_ until old age catches up with them."

Henry leaned back, his hair dampening the headrest. "When one knows death is going to be no more than a temporary inconvenience, adherence to a survival instinct is the first thing to go," he answered, sounding too much like a fortune cookie.

"What do you think goes when you know you're never going to grow up?" Jo asked. She didn't expect an answer beyond the one she already had — and Henry didn't supply one.

They'd reached the antique store. She pulled as close to the back door as she could get so Henry wouldn't have to spend more time semi-naked in the open than necessary, dropped him off, then went to park the car. Her legs grew heavier with each step on the walk back, and her side throbbed. She thought she could feel blood seeping through her hasty bandage, though she wasn't about to stop in the middle of the alley to check.

They had time to figure out what to do, Henry had said. Only, what were they supposed to do? Her training said to arrest Kenny and let the justice process do what it was designed for. As addled as her head was, she already knew that would create many more problems. Merely writing out the timeline of events in her report would doom her. Selectively editing the timeline for believability would end in her perjuring herself. And if it came down to her word versus Kenny's … she shuddered in the imagined breeze of how quickly that would get thrown out. So, they had time, and they were going to have to make sure to use it.

She finally reached the door, already despairing at how she was going to make it up the stairs again. Henry stood just inside the door, waiting for her, wearing only his towel. From his hand dangled a pair of empty handcuffs.

"He's gone."


	17. Wednesday - Richie and ensemble

Richie sped through the streets, sticking as much as he could to the side roads. The later evening hour meant that the peak of rush hour traffic had passed, which only meant that he had fewer horns blaring in his ear as he cut off the drivers who were in his way and blew through one, two, three red lights in quick succession. The best part about being Immortal was that he didn't have to give a damn about traffic safety. All he had to do was stay alive; anything else would heal or could be replaced. 

Most of his concentration was on navigating the obstacle course that was the New York City streets, leaving only a small part of his attention left for replaying the panicked phone call he'd received from Jo. The key word in the call, the one she dropped without fully realizing its importance, bounced through his head with each bump he drove over: Kenny.

While Richie had known Kenny was in town -- the Watcher's report had confirmed that -- he hadn't known that Jo and Henry had gotten caught up with him. Jo had never mentioned having any leads on the Drake case, so Richie has assumed there weren't any, once he had been cleared from the suspect list. To Jo, Kenny had been a protected witness, which required confidentiality on his whereabouts. She'd only been doing her job, and Richie couldn't blame her for that. He couldn't. No matter how much a part of him wanted to.

Because she'd found out the hard way what happened to people who made the mistake of trusting the little monster. 

She told Richie in a rush of words how Kenny had ambushed them, killed Henry, tried to kill her. 

_"Where is he now?" Richie asked, cutting to the most important question, and biting back the curse words that wanted to punctuate the question. He was talking to Jo and he knew Henry was standing in the background dripping water on the floor. If Kenny was an immediate threat, one of those details wouldn't be true._

_"He got away," Jo confirmed. "He could be anywhere. Can you find him?"_

_Richie raked his fingers through his hair and turned in a useless circle in the middle of his living room floor. "How do you expect me to do that?"_

_"You said you can sense—"_

_He waved a hand she couldn't see, interrupting before she could get any further with her misconception. "It doesn't work like that." Two days of driving up and down the streets in hopes of locating Kenny by accident had pounded that point home. "Where would he go?" He was trying not to yell; she was trying not to yell. Henry was speaking quickly and indecipherably in the background because he was also not-yelling. Kenny couldn't have gotten very far. "Come on, think! He's got—what?—twenty minutes lead time?"_

_Jo went silent for a long, long minute while Richie uselessly crossed to his window and looked out, confirming that Kenny wasn't standing on the street below. He wouldn't be; he didn't know where Richie lived. It was unlikely that he knew Richie was even in town, unless Jo had told him and she wouldn't have had any reason to do that._

_"Liam," Jo said suddenly. The name fell from her mouth in a rush of exhalation. "We took him to Liam's church."_

_Richie squeezed his eyes shut, composing himself. He had to believe that all her actions were well-meaning, but this…if Jo's decisions got Liam killed, Richie was going to make her tell Amanda herself, and damn the consequences. "I'll meet you there," he said, and ended the call._

_Methos finally looked up from his laptop as Richie stalked back across the room to collect his coat and sword. Even with his earbuds in, he couldn't have missed Richie's side of the conversation._

_"Found 'im. I'm going hunting," Richie said. It was the only explanation worth giving. "Don't wait up."_

Revving the motor, he swerved around a car that was double parked, then flipped the finger over his shoulder at the owner, who was standing on the sidewalk chatting with someone. They were lucky that he was in too much a rush to note the license plates, or he'd pass those on to Amanda, too. After her sticky fingers were done with them, the assholes would've never had another car to double park again.

Finally the church came into sight and Richie allowed the bike to slow. Kenny wouldn't be there; he was as helpless on Holy Ground as the rest of them. To kill him, Kenny would first have to lure Liam off the grounds.

Or meet him off the grounds.

His eye jumped to the schoolyard gate, which stood open. At this time of night?

Vaguely he remembered Liam mentioning Wednesday night catechism classes. He'd brought them up as if he thought Richie would be interested, and Richie had laughed and tried to play the idea off. Liam might have found a way to reconcile what he was with what he believed, but that was a box Richie didn't want to open.

The angle of the setting sun on the gate door cast a shadow across the entrance that made it impossible to see inside, so Richie jumped the curb and dumped the bike against the outer wall. Grabbing his sword, he raced onto the grounds. His steps thudded across the asphalt.

The school building was darkened, shades pulled on the windows. Any students were long gone—fortunately. Only the propped open door indicated that someone might still be in the building.

He couldn't feel anyone. No Immortal presence rang across his consciousness, which either meant he was in the wrong place...

Or he was too late.

His sweep of the building and grounds halted at the playground and a misshapen lump that lay on the far side.

Richie saw shoes, gray corduroy slacks, the tail of a white dress shirt, and then the faded blue plastic of the spiral slide. The breeze brought the copper tang of blood to him, a clash with the normal scents of sun-baked asphalt and wood. Panic seized his heart as he lurched toward the body.

"Liam," he gasped. "No!" 

The air didn't taste of a Quickening, so Richie cautiously let himself hope, approaching slowly for a clearer look while on guard for whomever had killed his friend. "Come on, man," he cajoled. "You can be dead as long as you're not, you know, _dead_."

Richie had learned a long time ago that prayers didn't work—not for him, anyway. They didn't make bad foster placements any easier to deal with, nor did they make good foster placements last. He went to church when he was told to, but he'd always had the feeling that the homilies were meant for that other kid, the one with the two parents and enough money for clothes that didn't come from rummage sales. Prayers didn't work for him, but they had to work for the priest.

They had to. And they had. Liam was obviously dead, lying in a pool of blood that was too heavy to soak into the treated woodchips. He lay with one arm twisted beneath his body and the other stretched over his head. A discarded baseball bat lay nearby. Richie skidded to his knees next to the body, fingers reaching to search for a pulse before he remembered that one wasn't necessary, not with what he could clearly see with his own eyes.Though bashed in, Liam's head was right where it was supposed to be. Liam was going to be fine.

The rush of Immortal presence swept over him, and Richie stood up, looking toward the school's main door where a wide trail of blood lead from the door, across the concrete, and then disappeared against the blackness of the asphalt.

A second later, Kenny walked out of the building with a machete that was too big for him gripped in both hands. More blood stained the front of his hoodie, and sweat darkened the pits. He was out of breath. As he came through, he kicked the doorstop out of the way, letting the door swing shut behind him. Aside from a brief falter as he stepped into range, he showed no concern for the Immortal he felt. Undoubtedly, he assumed it was Liam, newly revived and still healing. An Immortal in that state would present no challenge at all -- just the way Kenny liked it, which was why he had ambushed and incapacitated Liam inside, then dragged him off Holy Ground to finish the job. It was wrong on every level. 

Expression set, Richie stepped forward into the open space of the basketball court where he so often went one-on-one with Liam in a friendly match. "If you're going to play the Game," he announced, "then get out here and play it the right way." The security lights shone yellow circles on the ground and Richie moved instinctively to stand in one, sword raised, stance set. There'd be nothing friendly about what came next and he didn't want Kenny to make any mistake about what that was.

Kenny was taller than Richie remembered. Harder looking, too. Until he recognized the person waiting for him. "Richie!" he yelped, and seemed to shrink back into his clothes. In only a couple heartbeats, he once again became the frightened child he wore as his armor. His blue eyes widened and his lip began to quiver. "You can't kill me; I'm only a kid." He sounded like he was about to cry.

Richie snorted. "I fell for that when _I_ was a kid. I may not have gotten older, but I have grown up a little. You're not getting away this time." To himself, he rolled his eyes; Immortal trash-talk didn't have a lot of artistic merit.

Kenny sidled back, scrabbling for the door handle. They both knew that if he could retreat into the school building, he could disappear in the darkened hallways and escape out of one of the other doors. Otherwise, his only escape option was to step out of the entrance alcove and try to run around the building. Richie's longer stride and better fitness meant that Kenny wouldn't get very far. Too late, Kenny released his mistake: When it had closed behind him, the door also locked. He yanked on the handle, rattling it uselessly, then slid his eyes toward Liam, the one who would have the key.

"He wasn't a threat to you," Richie stated. "Liam was out of the Game. If you'd asked instead of attacking him, he could have helped you, given you a safe place to stay for a couple years."

"People always say that!" Kenny retorted. "And they never mean it." Decision made for him, he advanced out of the alcove, angling toward Liam's body and never taking his eyes off Richie's sword. "You all want to kill me." He said it as if he saw no difference between Liam's motivations and Richie's. "There's no such thing as a safe place, not when you look like me." Eyes narrowing, he added, "And there's no such thing as being out of the Game."

With a nod, Richie conceded that. For some of them, there wasn't. Those who tried usually found themselves pulled back in eventually, like he had. Liam had managed to stay out for over two hundred years, and look what happened—the Game came for him in the form of a ten year old boy. "Yeah, well, you had your chance. Then you came to this town which, lemme tell you, was the stupidest thing you could have done. You showed up, made trouble where there didn't have to be any, tried to kill my friends…" Thank god Henry was immortal and Jo was trained to protect herself.

A rush of presence swept down his spine and a moment later he heard the gasp of air being sucked back into lungs that hadn't needed it. Liam was back, and Kenny knew it too.

Trying to act before Liam regained his equilibrium, Kenny bolted for him.

In two strides, Richie intercepted Kenny's path and brought his sword down in a slash that started at Kenny's left shoulder and cut down to his right hip. His hoodie sliced open, the edges immediately wicking up the blood that welled from the gash. Too late, Kenny brought his sword up to parry the attack. The sword flashed in the light as the momentum of its swing overbalanced the injured boy. _"He's not big enough and he'll never be strong enough," Mac had said._ Kenny stumbled out of reach, but not before Richie felt a twinge of guilt at initiating such an unequal Challenge, though at least it was a Challenge. Liam hadn't been given that courtesy.

"Leave him out of this," Richie ordered. "This fight is between you and me."

Behind him, he heard footsteps and the scrape of the metal front gate as it swung closed. He spared a glance over his shoulder to confirm that the interlopers were Jo and Henry. He hadn't wanted them to see this—not tonight, not ever. But he was too far in it to stop. Letting Kenny go now would only reschedule this fight for some future date, and extend the trail of bodies that led up to it.

Kenny took advantage of Richie's distraction to strike at Richie's knees. Richie got his own sword down in time to block the attack, and the two blades clashed with a shower of sparks.

"What was that?" Henry asked, as if unaware that now was a good time for him to keep his mouth shut.

At the sound of his voice, Kenny paled and stumbled once more. "What are you doing here? You shouldn't be here." He looked at Richie. "What are they doing here?"

"It's like seeing a ghost, isn't it?" Richie taunted. "Guess you picked the wrong people to mess with this time."

"They can't interfere!" Toward Jo and Henry, he repeated, "You can't interfere. It's against the rules." Kenny's next swing went wide and Richie avoided it simply by twisting his body out of the way. Eight hundred years on his side and Kenny barely knew how to fight. With a shorter sword or more chance to mentally prepare, he might have stood a chance. As he had neither, the duel was fair only in technicality.

" _Now_ you're worried about the rules? Hey, Kenny, guess what? There's a more important rule here." Normally he wouldn't say it. With Jo and Henry listening, he felt the need to. He was burning his life here, but he couldn't leave them thinking that what they were seeing was senseless. Tightening his grip, he pulled the sword back to give it more room to gather speed, and then he spoke: "There can be only one."

The final strike cleaved Kenny's sword in two and kept going through the skin, muscle, tendons, and bones of Kenny's neck.

The momentum carried Richie around so that he was facing his witnesses. Henry and Jo stood with their hands clasped, leaning into each other. Matching expressions of shock stained their faces. Jo started to jolt forward and Henry pulled her back. She tried again and managed to yank Henry along with her. "You—" she started.

"Stay back," Richie spoke around the energy that was building in the air and sending static across his skin. "Liam, get them back."

Liam had managed to stand up, but wasn't yet up to doing more than leaning against the slide while he gathered his strength, one hand pressed to his bloodied head. "You saved my life," he said. "I owe you."

Richie managed a wan smile, and then the first security light exploded in a shower of glass. Streaks of electric current shot across the metal chains of the swings and along the base of the merry-go-round, wending around until they homed in on him.

A bolt hit him and cracked his mind open. Eight centuries of desperation and fear poured in while his body jerked under its own onslaught. He'd won the fight, and now Kenny got to exact his last revenge.


	18. Wednesday - Jo and ensemble

The lightning faded and Richie slumped to the ground, his body folding over backward. In the aftermath of the explosions and Richie's screaming, the playground fell eerily silent.

"That was…" Jo started, then found herself at a loss for descriptors. The structures of the playground drew stark lines in the fading light, sectioning the area off like a before-and-after picture. In the back stood the swingset with its attached tower that led to the slide, against which Jo saw Liam leaning. Behind him the shadows dimmed toward the back wall of the school grounds. In front, several small fires burned among the woodchips and broken glass glittered on the asphalt from the exploded security lights. The acrid smell of overheated metal filled the air.

At the edge of the playground lay Kenny's body, looking like he'd jumped from the swing and landed wrong—only he wouldn't be getting up from this. His sword lay just out of reach one direction, while in the other his blond mop of hair sat in stark contrast to the black surfacing on which his head had landed. A small, final flicker of electricity sparked around the stump of neck, and Jo idly noted it while the distant, deductive part of her mind spelled out a connection: _This is why there's no blood._

Between the body and the head lay the collapsed form of the boy's killer, the murder weapon still in hand. His chest heaved with the breaths of heavy exertion, though the fight itself had only lasted a couple minutes.

The cop in Jo knew what she had to do, while the injury on her side throbbed a counter-argument.

"A Quickening," Liam supplied, his voice breaking into her thoughts. He sounded strained, and Jo caught a movement like he'd lost his balance and grabbed onto the slide at the last moment to stay upright.

"Incredible," Henry stated. Pulling free from her grip, he went over to stomp out the nearest of the small fires. "Does this happen every time? Is it like _this_ every time?"

Jo nodded dumbly, both curious and horrified about the answer. She'd seen the effects twice now, yet hadn't thought to extrapolate backward to what caused them. She knew now that if she had, she wouldn't have been close.

Liam's answer came on a delay, as if he had to think about how much to tell him. Why hold back now, though? "I…think so."

Before Jo could ask what he meant, Richie stirred and straightened a leg—an effort which exhausted him. The other was still bent painfully beneath him. He was completely vulnerable in the way she'd seen too often in the survivors she contacted while investigating homicides.

Watching the lightning strike him, hearing his yells, seeing the contortions of his body and face had all felt obscene, like she'd witnessed him being raped. Of all the information about their Immortality Richie and Liam had volunteered so freely, they'd only acknowledged this part in its barest terms. Now she understood why. The movie had shown light and sound, but it couldn't capture the smell of ozone or burning flesh, or the electricity in the air that tingled her skin. It hadn't been able to capture the fear, anger, and desperation she'd felt swirling through the storm. If that's what a Quickening felt like to a mortal observer, what must it be to Richie at the center of it? Not sexual, but at least as intense. Not wanted, but accepted in its inevitability.

But, what really got her was the recognition that none of this was a new experience for Richie.

"Where did all that energy come from?" Jo heard Henry ask. "It can't have all been stored within the body and been undetectable." Squealing from the metal chains of the swings as they slowed filled the silence after the statement before Henry got there with his next thought. " _Is_ it undetectable? I didn't think to bring any of my instruments with me. Where could I...the science lab, of course! I need to get into the school. I'll need a voltmeter, magnets, and--"

"I can't allow that," Liam interrupted.

Henry barked the start of a protest, and Jo stopped listening. This was between them, and they were missing the most important thing.

Breaking her stunned torpor, she crossed over to the fallen teen. She knelt beside him to make sure he knew she was there, uncertain as to what his mental state could possibly be. "You OK?" she asked, reaching for a much lighter place than she felt. It was a stupid question and she knew it. Richie knew it too. The corner of his mouth tugged in a weak grin.

"Depends," he answered. "You gonna arrest me?"

She should. They both knew that, too. She'd just witnessed him kill someone, and do so as the clear assailant. But he'd done so only because she'd reached out to him. The extenuating circumstances complicated things well past what her training and experience covered. She had to trust her instincts on this one, and those told her what she needed to say.

"Actually, I thought I'd buy you a beer." 

"You... do?" Richie asked, surprise cracking his voice.

She grimaced and glanced down at her still blood-stained jeans -- she hadn't thought to change them -- and the hands that gripped her knees, clean, but only to the naked eye. "Just this once," she confirmed. This once she could understand and accept. There might be only once.

The laugh that had been starting turned into a grunt as she clasped Richie's forearm and pulled, having forgotten that she was also injured. A new bolt of pain stabbed her side. While she and Richie were about the same height, he had at least fifty pounds on her, and right now that was too much. "God, I'm sorry. I can't help."

"'S'okay. Not sure I want to get up. It's nice down here." Richie collapsed back, staring up at the sky while he regathered his strength. "On the other hand, I could use a drink," he added, as if in consultation with the clouds.

Jo stepped back, unsure what to do with herself yet not wanting to leave Richie like this. Her eye once again landed on Kenny's body. Were they just going to leave it here? Kenny had tried to kill her— _had_ killed Henry; she felt no sympathy for him, but he didn't deserve this. No, the custodians or children who would find the body tomorrow or the next day didn't deserve that.

"Kenny?" she asked.

"I'll take care of it," Liam answered. She spun and saw him still leaning against the slide. He had a hand pressed against his head and Jo thought she saw blood. Abruptly, she remembered the first time she'd met Richie and how he'd tripped on this very playground, skinning his forearm. It was the only time she'd felt a twinge of envy at what those Immortals had. After what she'd seen tonight, she was happy to put up with the weeks of discomfort her own would bring. 

"Probably better if you don't tell me how," she said, acknowledging that the body's disposal wasn't going to be legal. "Then I can honestly say I don't know what happened to him." The less she had to lie, the better it would be for all of them, no matter how curious she was about this too. She was suddenly aware of how often all the immortals must rely on half-truths and omitted details just to get through the day, and how careful they'd been to to be honest with her once she'd learned their secret. She hadn't appreciated what a risk that was.

Liam met her eyes and, with great solemnity, offered her an excuse to leave. "Why don't you get Richie out of here?"

"I'm fine," Richie responded. Using his sword as crutch, he'd finally managed to pull himself to his feet. "Raincheck on the beer? I wanna get home." He was wobbling, swaying slowly in the breeze like a man who'd already had too much to drink.

"At least let me drive you," Jo said. "You can pick up your bike tomorrow. We wouldn't want you to get stopped for driving under the influence." She chuckled at her own joke before it occurred to her that it might have too much truth in it. She _really_ didn't know what effects a Quickening was or wasn't supposed to have, but it wasn't difficult to see that Richie looked terrible: wan, eyes sunken, trembling. The evening light had picked up a blue tinge that painted Richie's skin a sick gray. "Someone can move your bike off the sidewalk after…" She gestured at the body, still not quite able to bring herself to say it. The less she spoke, the less complicit she'd feel.

"I'm fine," Richie repeated, just as his legs gave way at the first step. He stumbled and pitched forward, only managing to keep from face-planting because he was still leaning on his sword. "'m not fine. Yeah, I'll take that ride. And some help walking? The ground refuses to stay still."

"Go on," Liam said, still speaking carefully. "I'll have tea waiting when you get back, Jo."

Tea that would, no doubt, be heavily fortified. "Thank you," Jo answered, at the same time committing herself to coming back. She retrieved Richie's jacket from where he'd tossed it before the fight and let him tuck the sword inside, noting that the blade did have blood on it. It brought home the fact that Richie had killed someone tonight. Killed because he had to, yes, which she knew from experience only made it easier in the moment—and made all the moments after that so much harder to bear.

Together they made it to her car. The interior was warm from sitting in the sun, the air stale and still smelling strongly of the East River. Wrinkling her nose, Jo helped Richie into the passenger seat, then helped him buckle in. Rather than improving, his movements had become more sluggish.

"In case you're wondering, I'm not going to tell anyone what happened tonight," she said, after situating herself and getting the car started. The edge of her phone pressed into her leg, reminding her of the last call she'd received. Though she knew it wasn't true, she imagined that Lt. Reece still stood on the other end of that connection, listening. Pressing the power button, she did something she else never did: she turned the phone off. 

Traffic was thin and she was able to pull out of her hasty parking spot with little trouble. Cars were parked up on both sides of the street, narrowing the through way to a width that made it necessary to ease her car past the oncoming traffic. Still, after a lifetime of driving in the city, she was used to this. After they hit the main roads, she'd have to concentrate more, and perhaps find a different topic. "No one would believe me anyway. Hell, I wouldn't believe me, if I hadn't seen it myself." Keeping some events off the books was worth it to maintain her professional credibility, at least in this case. "As much as I hate to admit you, you did a good thing tonight."

Richie didn't respond.

She spared a glance over, a little miffed that he wasn't going to acknowledge her attempt at an apology, and saw him slumped against the window. His mouth was slack, eyes open and staring at nothing. Only the seatbelt was keeping him upright. Jo's foot slipped off the gas pedal and the car jolted. Behind her, a horn blared. She shook her fist at the impatient driver while struggling to compose herself. 

_He's dead,_ she thought. 

Then, out loud, she repeated the words. Hearing them didn't make them any more real. She checked again and saw Richie's hands laying limp in his lap just like Drake's had been. She'd seen enough corpses to know what one looked like. Henry had vanished when he died, and Richie had ... not. He was just dead. From what? He was supposed to be immortal from all except beheading. Were Quickenings lethal, as well? No one had so much as hinted at that, not even the movie. Now he was dead -- and in her car.

He hadn't sustained any injuries in the fight that she'd seen, so she wouldn't have to clean blood out of her upholstery along with the diluted sewage of the river. But that didn't change the fact that she was driving with a dead body in the passenger seat, and she didn't know what to do.

So, at the next stop light, she reached over and closed his eyes.


	19. Wednesday - Henry & Liam

"Go on," Henry heard Liam say, "I'll have tea waiting when you get back, Jo."

He heard the pain in Liam's voice and looked up to see Liam with his hand pressed to his head. In stamping out the fires, Henry had circled behind the swing set and now stood with Liam between him and the others. The last of the setting sun glimmered off the balding spot on top of the priest's head, and only then did Henry notice the blood that matted Liam's hair and spread in a damp patch over his collar and down his arm. In the shadow under the curve of the slide lay a baseball bat. Henry couldn't see it well enough to do more than recognize what it was, but he knew that it would also have blood on it. No one would question a young boy with a baseball bat, and Henry easily imagined Kenny using that trust to get close enough to Liam to bludgeon him unconscious.

Since Liam's survival wasn't in question—anymore—Henry crawled under the slide to retrieve the weapon before it slipped their minds completely. The less evidence laying around, the better.

Back at the apartment, he'd barely had time to grab a quick shower and pull on some clothes before he and Jo ran out the door again. He certainly hadn't had the time to attend properly to his grooming, which led to him now having an untucked shirt, unbuttoned cuffs, and a towel still around his neck from drying off his hair. Almost too late, he found the blood on the ground where Liam must have fallen, only barely managing to keep his shirttails from dragging through it. The stain was substantial, and Henry inspected it, then looked back up at his friend. Injuries healed quickly, he knew, but how long did it take for blood loss to resolve itself? And how much blood had Liam lost?

"Why don't you get Richie out of here?" Liam suggested.

It was an innocuous sentence, but Henry caught the timbre of someone trying to disguise his own needs so that someone worse off could receive faster aid. He'd heard it from soldiers while they tried to keep their guts from falling out and sailors with hasty tourniquets around the stumps of severed limbs, which made him attuned to what it meant. Quickly, he used the bat to stir dry woodchips over the the wet ones, doing his best to conceal that piece of evidence too, before crossing to his friend's side.

"You're injured," Henry stated. "Let me take a look." He approached carefully, not wanting to startle him. A head injury bad enough to knock a man out could mean a concussion, unpredictable movements, confusion, or any number of other problems, and Henry simply didn't know how that might manifest in a person over two hundred years old.

"No need." Liam touched the wound, at first tentative and then more probing. "It's healing. Another hour or so and I won't even have a headache."

"An hour?" Henry frowned; that seemed long. So many questions he didn't have the answer to and had been denied the chance to study.

A month or so after they'd met, Henry had taken Richie down to his work room to show him his research. As expected, the chalkboard on which Henry recorded his recent deaths had caught Richie's eye and he’d walked straight over to read it. 

"Reappearance Table," Richie said, "August 25, 1990. January 7, 1992. October 30, 1993." His eye skipped to the newest entry. "October 17, 2015." He gave a shudder in memory of why that entry existed. "Geez, I try _not_ to think about how I've died, and you have it so you can't forget." Pivoting slowly, he took in the rest of the lab and all the _memento mori_ Henry had on display. "What's all this for?"

"It's part of my research on my condition. Determining an originating cause of the immortality is important, of course, though I find I'm much more intrigued with the nature of my deaths and awakenings, starting with isolating and understanding how my body and possessions vanish in their entirety, and how it is that my body reappears, whole and unharmed, some distance away and always in water." 

Henry stopped for a moment, brow creasing in thought. "And now I realize these phenomena are more unique than I had supposed. Your experiences of death and awakening don't compare at all." Richie had shoved his hands in his pockets and was now flicking his gaze intermittently over Henry's shoulder, as if waiting for a chance to take his exit. "Aren't you curious what makes you immortal or how you return to life after being killed?" 

"I know what makes me Immortal." The statement was dismissive, as if Henry should have already known he’s say that. Richie turned as Henry straightened up to full attention, and a certain gleam must have come to Henry's eye despite himself because Richie threw up his hands. "No, oh no. Uh-uh. I am _not_ letting you turn me into your guinea pig

"Consider what we could learn by combining the data from both of our types of immortality," Henry protested. "Your ability to heal from even the most grievous wounds at a speed that does not exist elsewhere in nature, my ability to rejuvenate injury-free, both of our stases in aging — think what this could mean for the medical community!"

Richie glanced at the lab table that dominated the center of the room. His body tensed and he took a small step back. It was the first time Henry had seen such unguarded fear on the young man's face.

"Uh-uh," Richie repeated, louder. "I know too many other Immortals who've ended up on the wrong end of someone's research project. I'm fine with answering questions, but that's where it ends. Mortals are just gonna have to keep on living and dying without knowing that there's other options."

Henry drew in a breath, preparing a counter-argument, then let it out again when he saw the resolve in Richie's eyes. As much as willful ignorance offended him, he could also understand the self-protection that drove it. Too often, enthusiastic medical researchers crossed into committing flat out torture. Henry would not be one of them. He was no Mengele, either, and he'd do well to take care never to become like him.

"Very well," he conceded. "And, my apologies. I did not mean to suggest anything that would cause you permanent harm, be it psychological, if not physical."

He could afford to be patient. Eventually, Richie would come around. Or Liam would. Or, perhaps, he could talk Matt into undergoing some tests. After all, they had nothing but time. 

On the playground, the sun had finally finished setting, leaving the space in the gossamer darkness caused by the city's abundant light pollution. It was dark enough, however, to encourage Henry to shiver from the drop of temperature and to lower his volume as he spoke.

"You need to sit down," he suggested. "Let's get you off your feet."

The nearest places were the lip of the slide or the swings, though neither seemed either comfortable or stable enough for what Liam needed. Stabilizing Liam with a hand on his elbow, Henry began to lead him off the playground toward the benches near the basketball court—the ones on the far side of Kenny's body. They moved slowly, Liam shuffling feet that were too heavy to pick up, kicking a trail through the broken glass. That was the only thing that kept Henry from falling over when Liam abruptly let go and slipped to his knees.

They'd reached Kenny's head, which had rolled so one cheek was pressed to the asphalt. At the angle it lay, with the shadows falling as they did, the head looked at first glance like a misshapen ball. The part of Henry that wanted to believe it hadn't witnessed a brutal public execution tried to convince him that a ball was all the head could be, while his more experienced side chided him for even daring to entertain such naivete.

Liam had no such stumbling block. "I have to take care of him, first," he stated. "Just because his physical Immortality has ended doesn't his spiritual one should be neglected." Shifting the head so that it was facing up, Liam closed the boy's eyes, bowed his own head in a brief prayer, then traced a cross on the pale forehead. The reverence of the moment had Henry folding his fingers together, despite not being religious. No one else would be mourning this death.

A death that could, so easily, have been Liam's instead.

Not for the first time it truly struck Henry how different his immortality was from his friends'. They could die, and knew it. His time with them could be just as limited as with Jo. He would have to be more diligent about not taking their presence in his life for granted, and about doing more to overtly acknowledge the importance they played in his life.

When Liam pulled back, they both saw the red smear on Kenny's forehead and the clear fingerprint it contained. Neither of them had thought to have Liam wipe his hands off.

A strangled noise escaped from Liam that grated against the silence of the evening. It took Henry a moment to identify the sound as laughter.

From his kneeling position, Liam looked up at Henry, his face catching and reflecting the moonlight that dared come into the yard. "Remember how it was before fingerprints were discovered? A person could take his family to a crime scene the way modern people go to the movies. No one gave any thought to touching the evidence or taking a scrap of clothing or a lock of hair for a souvenir. Now you have to be so careful. Touch nothing, take nothing." He looked up at Henry. The shadows under his eyes were heavier than usual. "Were you as incredulous as I was when the newspapers first tried to explain how these marks on our bodies could be used for identification?" He waggled his bloody fingers at Henry, his chest heaving with now-noiseless laughter. "I think my body disposal practices are badly out-of-date."

He was in shock, Henry recognized, and if he didn't snap out of it, the inevitable person who came to investigate the fireworks display was going to find them both in a very compromising position. The only thing that had so far prevented it was Henry's foresight in closing the front gate. "Yes, yes, fingerprints were quite the discovery. Even I mistook them for weak replacement for phrenology for some time, though part of that lies in the fault of the explanations for how they were to be used. Can you stand?"

The answer to that was yes. Liam rose to his feet with Henry's hand again on his elbow to guide him. "Head wounds," Liam offered, by way of explanation, as he swayed, still letting out intermittent bursts of laughter. "Been a long time since I was killed." He winced, crushing his eyes shut. "I'd forgotten how horrible revival is."

"You died?" Henry's grip tightening involuntarily, and he offered a correction of what happened. "He killed you? But that… can't be within the rules, can it?" 

Liam reached up as if to probe his injury, then dropped his hand. "Some might argue that it was a clever work-around." He glanced toward the school, the building now resting alone and quiet in the darkness. "Holy Ground has limits to the refuge it offers." His sigh came out a last mangled piece of laughter.

"But, death would have rendered you completely helpless," Henry continued. "You wouldn't have been able to fight back." 

Liam stopped his shuffle toward the slide and pulled away from Henry far enough to take in the hastily donned clothing and still-damp hair, noting consciously what he had no doubt seen from the moment he caught sight of Henry. Glancing down at the head, he commented, "Well, weren't you busy?" Back to Henry, he said, "I don't believe the lad was interested in his victims being able to fight back. It seems he took the time to kill both of us." He rolled his lips together, prepping to ask the harder, inevitable question. "Who else?"

"Jo," Henry answered. They both glanced toward the gate, recognizing that Jo had left under her own power. "A couple days rest and she'll be fine. He also attacked his social worker after she picked him up today." Henry hefted the bat that he carried in his other hand, considering. No one had told Jo the nature of the attack, which led him to think he now held the weapon from that assault, too. "Probably with this. The doctors are…optimistic…about her making a full recovery. In time."

"That's some good news. He was able to kill me with only one blow, and I never saw it coming."

It was hard to believe that a person Kenny's size could inflict that kind of damage; it took a lot of strength to bludgeon someone to death. Or a lot of determination. The more Henry learned, the more he saw how _much_ desperation drove Kenny's actions. Rhonda was trying to get Kenny back in the System, a place he couldn't risk being. He'd come after Henry and Jo because they knew his secret. But, why would he return here to kill Liam? That was a lot of circling the city for a person who should have been trying to flee it.

"I don't understand why; you're not in the Game. He knew that."

"It's a matter of perspective, now isn't it?" Liam countered. He tugged the towel from Henry's shoulders and knelt down to gather Kenny's head in it. Henry flinched—it was one of his good towels, made of thick Egyptian cotton, cream colored, a delight to dry off with after a cold drenching in the East River. And now it had become a funeral shroud for someone who'd done precious little to warrant any other kind of comfort. "I'm Immortal. That's all he cared about." More quietly, he added, "He won't be the last one, either." As he straightened up, and had to grab Henry's arm to keep from losing his balance, it became clear that Liam was still in no shape to do the job he needed to do.

In an evening with so many extremes—so much violence and death, and also some of the most profound examples of friendship and love Henry had ever seen—he had reached a kind of emotional numbness. In the morning he might regret what he was about to do. Right now, it needed to be done.

"Let me help," he said. "I'll carry the body, if you'll show me where to take it."


	20. Wednesday - Jo & Methos

Jo spent the drive back to Richie's acutely aware that she had a corpse in the seat next to her. She tried to pretend he was sleeping—only the small snuffles and snorts, the steady breathing, the twitches and futile attempts to get comfortable in a moving vehicle that a sleeping passenger would make were all absent. Richie jostled along with the bumps in the road—once banging his head on the window hard enough to make Jo wince—and was perfectly silent.

She blindly followed the directions the GPS spat out to her, the end goal provided from the driver's license in the wallet that Richie had managed to shove into her hand before … her pulse pounded in her ears and sour gorge rose in her throat as she struggled to acknowledge the correct action … before he'd died. In her car. In her care.

And she had no idea where she was going, except that she could see the city visibly deteriorate as she got closer.

With each turn and passing block, she also became more acutely aware of the bloody sword laying in her back seat. A bloody _concealed_ sword.

As a cop, she normally didn't worry about being pulled over. Professional courtesy ran deep. Tonight, she kept her hands locked on the wheel, one eye on the odometer, and the rest of her attention on making sure she didn't look so suspicious that someone would pull her over just to find out what she was hiding. Bad enough she had started lying to Reece. No lie or cover story in the world would get her out of this.

Her side hurt. She'd strained it further helping Richie get to the car, and now that her adrenaline was wearing off, the wound began to throb hard enough to make her grit her teeth against the pain. In no way did she want immortality—either Henry's version or Richie's—but right now she wouldn't mind a bit of the rapid healing Richie had demonstrated. She cut a glance at him. Shouldn't he have healed by now? Come back to life? Henry's revival seemed to be effectively instantaneous. Kenny's had taken less than twenty minutes.

"Come on," she urged, her voice loud in the stillness of the car. "Come on."

It had already been twenty minutes. Was she supposed to do something to make the revival happen?

She recalled Henry explaining how he and Richie had met, how Richie had been out for hours. What was she supposed to do if he was out for hours now? She couldn't sit with him in her car all night, and she couldn't get him out of the car and up to his apartment all by herself, not with her own injury.

The nearest parking spot to his building was half a block away—which was honestly closer than she'd expected. Cutting the engine, she contemplated the odds of her dragging a corpse down the street without anyone noticing. A quick glance at the number of people who were out-and-about—many sitting on the steps of their buildings enjoying a balmy evening before the descending dark finished driving them indoors—told her that she had no chance at all. She'd grown up in a neighborhood not unlike this one and she knew how much people saw when strangers came into their space.

Liam's offer fell to a distant pleasantry with the realization that she had no choice now but to sit here until Richie revived. Somehow, she'd have to stay as inconspicuous as a person could in an unmarked police car, at night, with a dead passenger.

A sign on one of the stores caught her attention, and she peered closer at it as recognition bubbled through the haze of her exhaustion. She knew this street. Granted, she'd only been here once, and that was months ago. But she had been here, and for a very specific reason that now might be the miracle she needed.

She found the building that housed Richie's apartment and gambled that she knew the typical interior layouts of this style of building--so like one she'd grown up in--well enough to guess which window belonged to him. A light was on--which could mean nothing except that he'd neglected to shut it off before he left--and the shade was drawn. Craning her head, she sought for a glimpse of anything that could tell her if she was on the right track.

Cars passed in a trickle that started to sputter as the night grew darker. From somewhere, music--gospel, she thought--began, rose in volume until she could almost make out the words, then sank back into quiet. Richie didn't move.

Then a man walked past the window, his form no more than a dark shadow, non-distinctive, until he stopped, turned, and cast a silhouette on the panel that she'd recognize anywhere.The gasp of air she sucked in sent a fresh wave of pain across her ribs. She'd once dropped that profile's owner off in front of this very building, and then had driven away without giving any thought to the name on the martial arts studio that occupied the first floor. 

For the second time that night, she found herself digging through a man's pockets. She found the keys and let herself out of the car, hoping that Richie would understand if he woke up before she returned. On impulse, she also grabbed his coat and sword. The less for a casual passerby to see if he glanced in the window, the better.

Too soon, she found herself in front of his door. Pressing her ear to the wood, she listened for the sounds of someone inside. What would she do if she'd been wrong? The apartment position fit with her guess, but location told her nothing about occupants. Liam had mentioned that Richie's girlfriend was visiting. What would Jo do if the girlfriend answered? If she didn't know; this was not the way for her to find out. The apartment sounded empty, but her instincts told her it wasn't. Steeling herself, she knocked. The sound ricocheted through the hallway and she stepped back, hugging the jacket to herself.

She was just raising her hand to knock again when the door swung open. On the other side stood Matt Adamson, dressed in a white undershirt, blue boxers, and nothing else. A pair of earbuds hung looped around his neck. She never thought she'd be so happy to see him again, if not this much of him. Here was the one person who could help her.

"Detective Martinez." He offered her a smile of bland amusement, which faded and then slipped off his face completely when he saw what she was holding. His jaw set, the hand on the door frame gripping hard enough to splinter the wood, giving mute testimony to what he couldn't say: He thought she was there on the one duty every cop hated to perform.

"No," she interrupted before he could do anything rash. "He's downstairs."

Matt swallowed. "Alive?"

How was she supposed to answer that? She reached to brush back her hair and hissed as the movement tugged at her scabbing wound. _Keep it simple_ , she decided. _This isn't the time for misunderstandings._ "Not… currently. May I come in?" This also wasn't a conversation to be having in the hallway.

He waved her in and closed the door, already looking calmer. "You're hurt," he said.

"Yeah," she agreed, glancing down as if to confirm the injury. Fresh blood had leaked through the hasty bandage she'd put on and was now staining her shirt along her left side. She blew out a weary sigh. "It's been a busy night." Wasn't that an understatement? "Richie won," she added before he could reach the wrong conclusion again. She handed over the jacket-and-sword. "I … don't know what else to tell you … what you already know … what you need to know…." She trailed off, somewhat confused by her own incoherence.

Matt pulled the sword out, eyeing the blood on the blade with distaste. "Tell me he died before he had a chance to clean this."

Jo nodded; that one was easy to answer, and she was grateful for it. "In the car, on the way here. I don't know why. I saw the whole fight and it didn't look like he got injured. Not until afterward, anyway, with the lightning and explosions and stuff which I thought were going to kill him. And I guess it did." She looked again toward her own injury. "I can't get him up the stairs by myself." 

She waited until Matt set the sword on the counter--until it wasn't in reach anymore--before she said anything further. "I didn't know what else to do. I've never had someone die on me before. Like this, anyway." Henry's death didn't count. Henry's death couldn't count. She wasn't ready to process that yet. Feeling her own exhaustion catching up to her, Jo stumbled over to the sofa and sank down on its arm. "This is temporary, right? He really is immortal?" After everything, it was still a question she needed to ask. Finding out otherwise would be the perfect capstone to a lousy day.

"As long as his head's attached," Matt answered, and Jo grunted her assent that it was. Matt gave her a searching look, then disappeared into one of the bedrooms with a trailing, "I'm gonna go get him. In your car, you said?"

She pointed in the relevant direction before remembering that Matt couldn't see her. "Yeah. Down the street."

Matt emerged a minute later with jeans on, the earbuds gone, and a leather bag that looked like an old fashioned doctor's kit in his hand, which he set on the table. Sitting down on a kitchen chair, he began to pull on a pair of hiking boots that rested near the front door. "Stay here. I want to take a look at you when I get back. Is it a sword wound?"

"Gunshot."

His eyebrows went up. "And you're here instead of at hospital?"

"I can't go to one. It would raise too many questions," she answered. The instant she'd seen Kenny aiming her gun at her, she'd known that whatever happened next would have to be off the books. She'd had no inkling then of how _much_ that would be. "Hospitals are required by law to report all gunshot wounds, and I haven't had a chance to think of a believable cover story for how I got it. Or ... if I can." Idly, she scraped at the textured upholstery of the sofa, for lack of anything more meaningful to do.

With a nod, Methos rose. "Stay here," he repeated, pulling the keys she'd forgotten she was still holding from her hand, and left.

Jo wasn't going to argue. The idea of dealing with the stairs again this soon was too much. Besides, she really couldn't do anything to help besides point out which car was hers, and she figured that Matt was astute enough to figure that out for himself. The presence of the dead guy in it would be a big hint. So she waited, at first staring at nothing, then taking in the decor.

The furniture was minimal: a sofa, coffee table, kitchen table, a straight-backed chair, and a pair of bar stools. Everything looked straight out of 1966, down to the cracked vinyl on the seat of the stools and the brown and orange pattern of the upholstery. Richie wasn't old enough to have bought all this first hand, which meant he likely acquired it hand-me-down. More likely, he'd rescued it from a curb. 

The only items of worth were a new-looking flat screen television that sat on a plank that was, in turn, resting on a pair of concrete blocks, and a tangle of cords and controllers that looked to be the nest for multiple video game consoles. For someone in his forties, he was doing an excellent job putting on the appearance of a barely-scraping-by twenty-something. It was depressing, she decided. Even in his own home, he couldn't let down his guard. Nor would he ever be able to. It was a life she wouldn't wish on anyone, and an insight she didn't know what to do with.

The door flew open and Matt strode in with Richie slung in a fireman's carry over his shoulder. Jo saw him through the dream-like fugue she'd slipped into, his face set in a mask of concentration, his stride sure. The weight of a full-grown man appeared to be no inconvenience to him at all.

Shaking her head, she dragged herself back. "Is he still…"

"As a doornail," Matt answered. He dumped the body on the sofa with no regard for how Richie's limbs fell and went back to shut the door. "You said you were there? That you saw the whole thing?" Jo nodded, feeling once again that she was admitting to something she wasn't supposed to know. "Are you certain he didn't sustain any injuries? The person who shot you…."

"Same person," Jo confirmed. "Not the same time. Or the same place." Already the timeline was getting muddled in her head and she was grateful for the chance to say it all out loud, to confirm that the evening had happened as she remembered. "Richie didn't get involved 'til the end."

"After you called him?"

The question took Jo aback. Somehow it hadn't occurred to her that Richie would have shared that detail with anyone, that Richie had anyone to share that detail with. She glanced around the room, trying to work out why the idea was so difficult -- at first seeing nothing, and then realizing that the nothing was the reason. Everything in the apartment that Jo could see was clearly Richie's; there was nothing to indicate the tastes or preferences of a second person. "You were here," she stated, slowly, still working through the issue. "Why were you here? Why were you waiting?" 

"Is it really that hard to imagine?" Matt countered. "I live here, just like I told you when you kindly chauffeured me. Really. Now come sit over here where the light's better." He pointed to the kitchen chair, then looked up at the yellow-stained light cover. "Marginally. I'll also need you to take your shirt off so I can see the wound."

"Are you a doctor?"

"I have been," Matt answered, opening the bag and taking out a suture kit that looked like ones Jo'd seen on display in Abe's antique store. 

"In this century?"

Matt raised an eyebrow at her. "You're asking a lot of questions. Considering we're only sixteen years into this century, I don't think the answer is going to tell you much. However: No. Not in this century. Though it has been recently enough that I know about newfangled medical practices like washing my hands before performing surgery, so…" While she carefully unbuttoned her shirt, Matt went over to the sink and put word into deed.

Tilting her head, Jo studied Matt from behind and tried to put together what little she knew about him. He'd been a doctor at some point and wasn't now. He was such a confident fighter that he hadn't been afraid to go up against Kostya unarmed, yet he'd had an arsenal in his coat when he went to the liquor store. He was on good enough terms with Richie to be living with him, and yet Richie had never mentioned him in conversation. The contradictions were more than she wanted to puzzle through right now. "How old are you?" she asked, deciding to go straight for the most basic fact.

Matt shut the water off and grabbed some paper towels to dry his hands on. "A day older than I was yesterday." It might have been the pain pill or the complete clusterfuck of a night, but she thought she heard a hint of darkness in an otherwise flippant response, though it was gone by the time he turned back to her. "Now let's see about that injury. You're going to need stitches. I hope you're not squeamish."

Jo could only stare, in lieu of having any more fucks to give.

She zoned out again while he helped her take her shirt off and started treating her wound. It was easier than being self-conscious about have her breasts on display in front of a person she barely knew and didn't have much reason to like.

Tomorrow she was going to call her mother-in-law. Jo had always gotten on well-enough with Susan. Their relationship couldn't be described as deep, yet was always pleasant. They talked about simple things: what sales they'd encountered, the state of the roads in the city, gossip about what Sean's extended family was up to. Heaven only knew what they'd discuss in tomorrow's call, but it wouldn't be immortals. They could talk about which of the cousins had gotten in trouble in school, which ones were trying to get pregnant—and which ones were too soon—, and who was searching for a new job, and Jo could make all the required noises of commiseration and scandalization without having to dismantle her own morality first.

She might even mention Henry.

Susan had been encouraging Jo to start dating again. "Sean would want you to move on," she'd said, more than once. "All he ever wanted was for you to be happy." It was trite as hell, well-meant, and true.

It seemed fair to give Susan a nice piece of completely normal gossip to take back to the family.

Soon enough, Matt was taping a fresh piece of gauze into place. "You got lucky. I didn't see any foreign material in the wound and I don't think your ribs suffered any damage that'll cause lasting problems. You'll need to keep this dry..."

"I've dealt with serious injuries before," Jo interrupted. She poked idly at the new bandage and recoiled when the spot underneath still hurt. From somewhere Matt produced a new shirt for her to wear. It was a men's cut, probably his, and she wouldn't have accepted it had her own not been soaked through with blood. Slowly, she got it on, even managing to get her arm into the sleeve without help. "Thank you. I'll have Henry look things over when I get home. He's a—"

"Medical examiner," Matt finished. "So I've heard." The touch of amusement that came into his tone was so at odds with the rest of his behavior that Jo gave him a double-take. "Just as well. Do I need to call you a cab?"

"I can drive," she answered, standing up. A cab would be smarter and safer, only she didn't want to leave her car here. "But I think I should stay until Richie…comes back? Resurrects? What's the right way to say it?" Henry would understand why she didn't return right away. She could leave a message at the rectory so he didn't worry.

"They all work." He too stood up. Rather than cleaning up from the impromptu surgery, as Jo expected, he slipped back into what she now recognized must be his bedroom. He came back out with a sword. "And you need to leave."

Alarmed, Jo stepped back. "What's that for?" She'd never been run out of someone's home at swordpoint before--assuming that 'running her out' is what Matt meant to do.  
Instead of coming toward her, he pulled one of the bar stools over near the sofa and straddled it, the sword seemingly as much a part of him as any of his limbs. In a flash, Jo realized what he meant to do with it. 

"You can't kill him!" Had she been in better shape, she might have tried to wrestle the sword away, to do anything to prevent another death this night. Or maybe that was the drugs talking. "You're supposed to be his friend. What are you doing?!"

Matt pondered the corpse on the couch in front of him. It was already looking paler, the blood that no longer flowed inside now succumbing to gravity, first from his upright position in the car and now his supine one on the sofa. Soon rigor would set in and the ungainly positions of his arms and legs would freeze him in a truly uncomfortable position. Did it hurt to come back from that, Jo wondered? Did Immortals revive from the dead only to suffer cricks in their back?

"I have no intention of taking Richard's head," he finally answered, once again derailing her thoughts before she could see where they were headed. He settled the sword across his knees like he was preparing for a long wait and turned an expression on her that gave away nothing of what he was thinking. "The prospect of taking a Quickening indoors, in a building as poorly constructed and maintained as this one is not one to be considered lightly. I do like to be prepared, though. If the person who comes back isn't Richie…"

All possible responses fled Jo's brain. The Quickening. All that energy that had flooded out of Kenny and pounded into Richie. She'd been wrong; she hadn't just asked him to kill another Immortal; she'd asked him to risk his very existence. What had she done?

"Leave now," Matt stated. "You can't do anything more for him."

For a moment, Jo hesitated. She was responsible for Richie's plight; if she left and he died for real, she'd always blame herself for dereliction. Perhaps recognizing the cause of her reluctance, Matt's gaze once again softened, a return to his more caring bedside manner. "He's in my care now. Trust me to do what's best for him, just as I did for you."

A glance down toward her now-patched wound, then over to the ever-paler body on the sofa, and Jo made her decision. She left.


End file.
